


Nobody's Eyes (But Mine)

by tentacledicks



Category: Mass Effect: Andromeda
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Battle Couple, Canon-Typical Violence, M/M, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-29
Updated: 2020-11-29
Packaged: 2021-03-10 01:47:19
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 23,503
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27705758
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tentacledicks/pseuds/tentacledicks
Summary: The only thing Avitus wants is to be left alone while he drinks himself into an early grave. Sloane Kelly's Kadara is the perfect place for an old Spectre to fade away into the background, picking up odd jobs and avoiding the pressure to pick the winning side in her little turf war. He doesn't care, he doesn'twantto care, and he's been doing a damn fine job of not caring since the day he turned his back on the Pathfinder and everything the Nexus stood for.Then he took this job escorting an angara out into the wilds of Kadara, and not caring became a lot harder.
Relationships: Evfra de Tershaav/Avitus Rex
Comments: 7
Kudos: 20
Collections: Heart Attack Exchange 2020





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [greygerbil](https://archiveofourown.org/users/greygerbil/gifts).



“Rix, job for you.”

He groaned, refusing to look up from his drink as the Outcast messenger hovered at his shoulder. Annoying things, usually too eager to be the boot and forgetting what it was like to be stepped on, but mostly he disliked the way they panicked. Avitus believed that any competent commander shouldn’t send a skittish newbie into the slums.

“Hey, Rix, are you listening to me?” The messenger dropped the datapad on the bartop next to him, then reached a hand out to shove at his shoulder. “I’ve got a—”

He grabbed the hand, twisted the human around, then slammed them into the bar before they could put up a fight. Points to Kaetus, this one was smarter than the usual sort; they froze, just barely breathing, and didn’t try to break free. The less they fought back, the less he’d have to hurt them. Avitus appreciated that.

“I’m paid up,” he said, righting his now empty glass from where it had fallen over in the scuffle. Damn. He’d only gotten halfway through it, too. “I don’t have to take jack or shit for another three weeks.”

“Yeah, yeah, but, they thought this would be, you like these kinds of jobs, you know?” the human stammered, all their bravado gone. He was starting to feel a little bad about keeping them pinned, but the stupid thing had to learn: a uniform wasn’t enough to protect them, and the Outcasts wouldn’t fish them out of the shit they got themselves into. If they wanted to play tough, they had to learn how to back it up.

“Tell Kaetus he owes me for my drink,” Avitus said, finally letting go and picking up the datapad. The messenger scrambled up and away, fleeing Tartarus fast enough to draw the attention of a few of the regulars. Dumb kid. Someone needed to tell them not to run in a room full of predators.

Someone that wasn’t him, at least. 

It wasn’t like he had anything better to do than drink, but it was the principle of the thing. He wasn’t an Outcast, had no intention of joining them no matter how much Kaetus leaned on him to do so, and he wasn’t going to be their whipping boy. After turning his back on the Council and the Nexus, ignoring Sloane Kelly and her thugs was easy.

Reading through the brief, he could see why Kaetus was desperate enough to try and pass this on to a non-Outcast. They knew he wasn’t one of the lingering Collective agents still hiding in Kadara and they certainly couldn’t trust this to any of the brainless guns in the lower ranks. Problem was, all the smarter Outcasts were recognizable enough that they couldn’t handle subterfuge well. Impossible to pretend like they were regular mercenaries if all the shopkeepers were frantically offering them discounts as they passed by.

After the Outcasts had their hold solidified—and following the failure of the Nexus to establish an outpost on the surface of Kadara—Sloane had gotten a lot more obvious about her disdain for the angara. Not enough to kick them out yet, not enough to bar them from coming in to trade (and pay the protection fees), but she’d stopped pretending like offering them a voice was actually a priority. Avitus could feel sorry for the poor bastards, but most of the angara had seen the writing on the wall and left Kadara months ago. Which made having _this_ one show up from offworld, talking about setting up a network outside of view from their Resistance leadership, a big concern.

Sloane wanted a spy, maybe even an assassin. Kaetus wanted an idea of what the angara were planning next. Avitus just wanted to be left alone… but leaving Kadara Port was as good a way to manage that as any.

He bought another bottle of horosk and left the bar. Couldn’t hurt to see if this angara was still looking for an escort. Just because he wasn’t taking the job for the Outcasts didn’t mean he couldn’t profit off some poor schmuck needing help navigating the sulfurous pools of Kadara’s far-flung wilds.

Kaetus had included a description of the angara and his ship, presumably under the (correct) impression that Avitus would throw whatever messenger he sent out on their ear. Avitus ignored the guards at the docks entirely, heading for the repurposed shuttle of angara make that bore the distinctive burns of deep-space combat. Targeted by pirates at some point, he’d wager, though whether those pirates were angaran or Exiles was harder to guess. Probably didn’t matter. Most of the pirate crews were becoming more integrated than the rest of the galaxy.

Leaning on the railing just past the ship’s berth was the angara in question, arguing with an Outcast guard that had probably been sent to stall him. The armor wasn’t Resistance, but the cut of the clothes suggested Voeld—Harvarl’s angara generally preferred looser tops with more color to them, but Voeld dressed warm. Since he hadn’t seen many angara from Aya, Avitus couldn’t figure them out one way or another. Voeld, pirate fire on his ship, one of those complicated head coverings that some of the more prudish angara wore. Almost definitely one of the angara that had disagreed with the Resistance, possibly one that was ex-Roekaar, and not a whole lot of good reasons for him to be making contact with the angara exiles living on this shithole of a planet.

For a second, Avitus was tempted to send a message to Ryder. Just a heads up that things in Kadara, already a mess after the last time she was here, were going to be even more of a mess soon. But the urge passed as quickly as it had come, and he rammed the butt of his horosk bottle into the soft spot between the guard’s shoulders.

“Hey!” The Outcast sputtered, swinging around and reaching for her pistol before pausing. Sloane had rules about who was allowed to start shooting in her city, and this low level flunky wasn’t above those. “You should know better than to start things you can’t finish.”

“Get lost,” Avitus said, already dismissing the kid. “I’m here to talk with him, not you.”

She wavered, clearly unhappy about having her authority questioned, but since there wasn’t a whole lot of it in the first place, she caved not long after. As she turned to stomp off, she said, “Sloane’s gonna hear about this.”

He didn’t roll his eyes, but it was a near thing. The angara regarded him with barely hidden hostility, his ice-blue eyes the only thing visible in the layers of his azure scarf, or whatever those were called. It was clear that he didn’t think Avitus was helping out of the kindness of his heart, and he was right.

“I heard you’re looking for someone to guard you through the wastelands,” Avitus told him, bottle still in hand. “I have a transport that can handle the mountain roads and I’m a damn good shot. For the right price, I’ll do it.”

“And what would be the right price?” the angara asked, his voice deep with the reverb that Avitus always expected to hear out of turian throats, not angaran ones. He wished that he’d thought to uncork the bottle before coming up here.

“More than free, but probably not as high as you’re thinking. I’m willing to negotiate.” That Outcast guard was talking to the dockmaster, jabbing her finger in his direction. He waited for them both to make eye contact, then very deliberately made a gesture that would get him kicked out of any decent turian business.

The angara stayed silent for a few seconds longer, then finally said, “Kovar.”

“What?” Neither the dockmaster nor the guard were turian, but they seemed to have gotten the message. His tariffs would be higher next month but Avitus couldn’t bring himself to care too much about that.

“My name. Kovar. Give me a place to meet you and we’ll head out within the hour.” All business, no pleasure. Well, the angara were blunt like that. Avitus settled the bottle in the crook of his elbow, pulling up his omnitool and transferring coordinates to Kovar’s own multitool.

“Make sure to pay your bribes before you head down the elevator or you won’t have a ship to come back to,” Avitus said. “I’ll meet you here.”

Kovar nodded, then turned to stalk back into his ship for whatever it was he was bringing to the angara out in the wilds. With the deal made and at least a few minutes more to himself, Avitus headed in search of a bottle opener.

* * *

The look in Kovar’s eyes was judgmental as he stared at the ugly little roller Avitus had claimed for himself. It had a metal roll cage and tires more than capable of handling the dirt on Kadara, but it was not an attractive vehicle. Some days, it wasn’t even a functional one.

He had a lot of fondness for the roller. They were two of a kind.

“It’ll get us where you’re going,” he said, swinging himself up into the passenger seat. “Stick the coordinates into the computer and that’ll give you a map. Left pedal is the clutch, center is the brake, right is the gas. Ever driven a land vehicle?”

“On occasion. Under duress.” Kovar didn’t protest as he climbed into the driver’s seat, but he didn’t look happy about it either. Tough shit. If he wanted to get going this quick, then he could deal with driving; Avitus was a perfectly capable shot while drunk, but the roads got tricky the further they went from the port and he didn’t trust himself not to drive off a cliff.

“You’ll do fine. If it stalls out, whatever. There’s fuel enough to handle a three week trip out and back again.” He propped the barrel of his rifle up against the window, adjusting the mirrors so he could keep an eye on their rear.

“That’s impressive. I would have thought the fuel tank was too small for that.” The engine sputtered before catching, the roller jolting forward for a second before the gear screamed in protest and it stalled out. Kovar made a noise of disgust, then started the roller again, going a little gentler on it as he shifted the second time.

(Macen, sitting cross-legged on the floor of their apartment, pieces of an engine scattered around him. His eyes were bright as he swept a hand out over the collection of parts, his voice dipping and swaying as he enthused about limited resources, the need for scarcity-based engineering, the ways to modify standard equipment so it was better suited for the new galaxy where everything would be uncertain. He’d been so excited to have a practical application for his skills, a new frontier for him to explore.)

“Yeah,” Avitus said, telling himself that it was too much of a hassle to dig his booze out from under the guns and rations stuffed in the back. “I tuned it up a bit. Made it more efficient.”

Kovar grunted rather than reply, but there was a grudging sort of respect to it. He’d take the realization that he wasn’t just a dumb thug. Frankly, Avitus was surprised he’d gotten even that much.

Sometimes, the people he escorted through Kadara were chatty. A lot of the time, really. People who came to Kadara might be tight-lipped when it came to their histories, but all of them had grievances they wanted to air. Problems with the Nexus, problems with Sloane, problems with the Pathfinder ( _the_ Pathfinder, as if Ryder was the only one worth mentioning, and Avitus was only a little bitter about that.) If they had their own transportation, he could avoid it, but the ones that needed him in the ship were the ones most likely to try and trap him into a conversation.

This time, silence filled the space between them. An hour outside of Kadara Port, Kovar tugged his rofjinn— _that_ was the word for it, it would have bugged Avitus until he’d remembered—down off his face, clearly more willing to put up with the haze of sulfur than the feeling of cloth over his mouth. Two scars cut parallel lines down his face, marring the mottled blue skin that had been hard to see under the folds of cloth. Avitus had caught a glimpse of them over his eye, but now he could see the way they sliced clean down over his mouth too, a nasty enough wound that he’d bet Kovar was one of the dangerous ones.

His theory about the angara being an ex-Roekaar became a little more plausible.

Kovar’s shifting grew smoother as he spent more time at the wheel, occasionally diverging from the road to take a shorter route over the foothills. By the time the sun was hanging low in the sky, turning Kadara’s skies into an inferno through the clouds, Avitus was sober enough to be annoyed by it, one arm hooked through the handle of the door to stabilize himself as they bounced over rocks and across ditches. The coordinates that Kovar had put in were in the opposite direction of a lot of the other settlements, deep enough in the mountains that it would take a couple days to get there. Definitely a remote angara community, and one far enough out that the usual suspects weren’t on the path to cause trouble.

“Looks like there’s a good bluff up there on the right,” he said, breaking the silence that had lingered between them for hours. “Pull up and put the roller between us and the sun, that’ll stop the wind from being a problem tonight. Hope you don’t mind camping.”

“I’ve slept in worse conditions,” Kovar said, navigating up to the spot Avitus had indicated. Even better, the bluff had an overhang that the nose of the roller just fit under. Between the rock face and the body of the vehicle, they had a nice space free of wind and mostly protected from the elements.

He hauled out the portable heater as Kovar dug into the box of rations he’d brought. Night swept in as they got settled, Avitus with a couple of protein bars and Kovar with that weird paste the angara all ate. At least, the angara from settled space; most of the ones out here couldn’t afford to be picky, so they settled for the less efficient unprocessed food available in the port. On the other hand, given what he’d heard about the taste of nutrient paste, maybe that was a blessing instead of a curse.

They were far enough out that the lights from Kadara Port didn’t bleed into the sky. Far enough out that _no_ lights bled into the sky, in fact, which meant that he’d be able to see anything mechanical coming their direction; the portable heater didn’t have any lights on it anymore, and Kovar was smart enough to dim the screen on his datapad as much as possible while he read through whatever was on it. Something to do with the angara he was going out to see.

Not his job to know what that was, but Avitus had the old itch to know anyways, years and years of spy work welling up like a bad habit. On the heels of that itch was the newer, fresher hurt that he didn’t want to look at, and as far as he was concerned, his private promise to leave the horosk alone was up. Didn’t have to stay dry just to keep watch at night.

“That bottle isn’t water,” Kovar observed, his voice low and soft in the night. 

“Nope.” Avitus didn’t glance over at him, keeping his attention on the road up towards their camp where the most likely threats would come from. “I’m a better shot drunk than most of Kadara is sober. We’ll be fine.”

“If you’re that good a shot drunk, then you must be an ace sober.” The quiet disapproval would have been funny if it hadn’t rung so close to true. Funnier still if he hadn’t heard it from every turian that knew his name—blessedly few, these days.

“I used to be a Spectre. Special Tactics and Reconnaissance. We were the best of the best and wherever we went, we _were_ the law. Playing mercenary on Kadara is practically a vacation for me. And you know what you do on vacation?” He lifted the bottle, wagging it slightly, then resettled his rifle as he leaned back against the roller.

“Hm.” There wasn’t anything more than that for a while, Kovar caught up in his own business and blessedly keeping his nose out of Avitus’s. It gave him time to turn his mystery client over in his head, puzzling over the oddities in his behavior.

By now, Avitus had figured out that the face covering wasn’t a cultural holdover like he’d initially assumed. Kovar was being careful to keep his face off of Kadara’s cameras, and doubly careful to avoid getting recognized. Wasn’t anyone that Kaetus knew by sight or sound, not yet, otherwise that would’ve been in the brief. Not Akksul, because Avitus would have recognized the voice, but probably a high ranking officer of some kind. His money was still on Roekaar, but he wondered if maybe ‘pirate’ wouldn’t be more accurate.

He hadn’t decided how much of this he’d pass on. Contrariness had him wanting to keep it all to himself, but that was a dangerous game too; Kaetus was a little more lenient on him, given everything, but Sloane was a hardass and she’d come down on him like the hammer of the titans if she thought he was hiding something. Maybe he could just seed in some of his less likely guesses, keep them both on their toes. Without the Charlatan around, she could use the workout.

It was right as he was feeling particularly smug about this decision that Kovar asked, “What changed?”

For a moment, he thought the angara was talking about the port. Maybe news of the shootout between Sloane and the Charlatan hadn’t been spread outside of Kadara. Then he remembered the line their conversation had taken and couldn’t help a soft, bitter laugh.

“I did,” he lied.

* * *

They went northeast in a mostly straight line, occasionally detouring around mountains and over the natural land bridges that crossed Kadara’s massive rivers. The water in them wasn’t as toxic as the standing springs, but it was still toxic enough that Avitus didn’t fancy taking a swim. Kovar seemed to know where he was going, so at least that wasn’t a near future possibility. 

That stilted, unfinished conversation set the tone for the rest of the trip. Kovar was probably more reluctant to discuss himself than Avitus was, and there wasn’t good neutral ground for small talk otherwise. The weather remained steady, none of the rock formations on this planet were particularly interesting or vulgar, and after the fourth time Kovar took an inexplicably roundabout way to their destination, Avitus realized he was avoiding the other angaran settlements out here.

He wanted to reach over and smack Kovar’s hands off the wheel the fifth time it happened. Avoiding them like that was as bad as marking them on a map for anyone observant enough to keep track. Maybe the average hired gun out here was too stupid to remember, but Avitus wasn’t even _tipsy_ and he certainly wasn’t stupid. Even if he was catnapping during the day while Kovar drove, he was awake often enough to remember the contours of the land and the shape of the valleys they were avoiding.

Not a pirate, he’d decided by the second night. Kovar had slept curled up in a tight ball, snapping awake every couple of hours like he didn’t trust Avitus not to make off with his life and livelihood. Good instincts, but combined with the avoidance of other angara, Avitus had him pegged as a loyalist of some kind. 

Resistance was unlikely, even if the cover story Kovar used on landing was definitely fake. His pet theory about the Roekaar was probably a little too romantic to be real, but Avitus was keeping it in the back of his head in case that loathing of aliens ended up with a gun at his head in the night. Trader collective? He hadn’t heard of one yet, but it wasn’t totally out of the question. Maybe with the Nexus’s attention on Kadara, some of the outlying angaran communities were thinking of touching base with their long lost friends and family.

By midday on the third day of travel, he’d decided that the puzzle wouldn’t get solved until he could do some digging back at the port. The mystery of it tugged at him, kept his attention long enough that he forgot to be annoyed by the awkward silence between them in the roller.

Then he smelled smoke, and the mystery stopped being so important.

“Hey,” he said, noticing the way Kovar slowed, hand twitching towards the gun at his hip, “keep rolling forward but go easy on the engine. No point in them figuring out we know what’s ahead.”

“You think they already know we’re coming?” Kovar asked, drawing his pistol and setting it in his lap as he entered a gulley that cut through steep, unclimbable walls. Great place for an ambush. _Perfect_ place for an ambush.

Avitus unbuckled himself, checking his rifle and then checking the mirrors. No one coming up from behind. A glance up towards the blue sky didn’t reveal any heads peeking down. “I think it’s pretty suspicious how this is the first settlement on our route that’s been burned, don’t you?”

Kovar grunted but didn’t disagree. They rolled through the gulley in silence, the engine’s soft rumbling echoing between the soaring rock walls. Avitus kept an eye on their rear as Kovar steered them around a curve, the golden gleam of light ahead announcing the end of their journey. The longer they went unharmed, the more Avitus’s battle sense tingled, anticipation of what was yet to come coiling through him.

He spotted the wires run through the rocks seconds before the dull thud of an explosion sounded above.

“Punch it!” he snapped as Kovar’s foot hit the gas, flipping his attention away from their rear—soon to be someone else’s problem—and towards the front, where the gulley’s exit was both too far and not far enough. Whoever had set up this ambush hadn’t been expecting his little roller to go as fast as it did, because the fighters waiting on the other side were startled into motion when they burst free of the falling boulders, just barely making it out in time.

Hadn’t expected Kovar to come with a guide either, because he was able to pop three in the head before they rallied enough to aim for _him_ instead of the angara. Bullets and incendiaries slammed into the side of the roller, shattering the windshield as he ducked and half-shoved Kovar out the driver’s door. He’d angled them, intentionally or not, so that the blocked off gulley was at their back and the roller between them and their attackers, so there was room for them to breathe in the moments after Avitus tumbled out with him.

“I suppose that answers my question,” Kovar said grimly, nudging one of the mirrors so he could see around the nose of the roller, his pistol held carefully. “Can you reach my rifle in the back?”

“Give me a second.” Avitus dropped low, peering through the bare few inches between the bottom of the rover and the ground, then settled his rifle against his shoulder. Bad angle, bad shot, but not bad enough to keep him from pulling the trigger and sending a turian staggering backwards. The rest of the raiders scattered behind cover, their moment of surprise ruined.

He popped back up, taking advantage of the panic to haul Kovar’s rifle out of the back along with one of the cans of ammo, then dropped behind the roller again before the raiders could rally.

“There might be people up on the bluffs,” Avitus said as he handed the rifle over and started separating out the spare magazines for his own. “I need you to stay here and cover me while I take care of our ambushers.”

“I can—” Kovar started to say before Avitus cut him off with a sharp gesture.

“You can _stay here_ while I finish the people up ahead. I’m not leaving myself open to sniper fire and I’m guessing whoever you came to find wasn’t from the Milky Way, right?” The silence was answer enough. “I’ll give the signal when it’s clear, you come in and help me identify the bodies. Don’t let me get shot.”

He didn’t give Kovar time to muster up another protest, only ducked around the corner and aimed. These raiders weren’t nearly organized enough to handle him; they broke cover without rhyme or reason, their shots sloppy and going wide as he blew holes in heads, shoulders, hands, incapacitating if he couldn’t kill in the breaths between aiming and firing. Turians and humans, which was a mistake too—he was _very_ familiar with turian and human armor, knew all the weak spots that none of them had figured out how to cover.

And unlike these assholes, Avitus was smart enough to pack shield-breaching ammo.

A heavy round buried itself in the rock next to his head as he took cover, the dull crack of a sniper rifle following a second later. He glanced back in time to see a figure topple off the top of the bluff, a second following close behind, and dismissed the threat. Kover knew how to handle a gun.

(If part of his brain noted that Kovar also had good reason to shoot _him_ now, he dismissed that too. What happened would happen. He wasn’t so attached to his life that he was going to get paranoid over it.)

The raiders were getting smarter, or their collective IQ was no longer lowered now that the weakest links had been picked off, because they’d retreated to the cluster of buildings and weren’t poking their heads out as often. Nexus equipment had reliable faults that he could exploit, but these were angaran, the curves and swoops of stone still alien despite how much time he’d spent in this stupid galaxy. Avitus squinted, scoped in, and fired at something that looked almost like a generator. It made a gratifying boom, at least.

“Now things are going to get interesting,” he muttered to himself, spotting the shuttle tucked almost out of sight. His next shot was for the stabilizers on it, the third for one of the critical vents. The realization that he was targeting their escape route brought raiders boiling out of hiding again, three, six, eight of them running right into his line of fire and dropping. At least two of them had taken bullets from behind the roller, which meant that Kovar was probably getting bored.

Needed to finish this up. He had a rule about letting his clients do stupid shit to hurt themselves under his watch. Avitus rolled out of cover, darting across the empty space between the rocks and the buildings as he flipped his rifle to automatic and gunned down the turian who made the mistake of trying to take advantage. There was a salarian hiding around the corner behind him, which was noteworthy only in that Avitus had been expecting a human and aimed a little lower than he usually would—the salarian died fast anyways.

Silence expanded out around him. He glanced into the buildings as he ducked around them, noting the dark interiors and counting the threats that weren’t. Kovar was keeping quiet too, the gunfire from behind the roller gone now that there weren’t anymore targets on the ground. In the distance, he spotted the hazy shape of a shuttle lifting off the mountain, and he called out, “Kovar, on your six—”

The krogan hit him like the morning after a levo-whiskey binge. Something in his hip _crunched_ in a bad way, head ringing as it bounced off the side of a building, and the enraged roar made it so he couldn’t hear anything else.

Most turians hated krogan on principle. Saren had taken it a step further; in his mind, the only good krogan was a dead krogan, and he’d taught Avitus half a dozen different ways to achieve that goal long before the krogan knew there was a fight underway. Shots ricocheted off _this_ krogan’s back, and he half-turned to shout at the impudent angara when Avitus drove his omni-blade up into the soft spot under his jaw.

No sense in aiming for the core. Too many extra organs, too easy to regenerate while they were busy fighting to get through armor both artificial and natural. Avitus jammed the barrel of his rifle into the hole he’d left behind, pulling the trigger as the krogan slammed him into the wall again, then collapsed on top of him.

“Shit,” Avitus hissed, shoving talons into the mess he’d made of the krogan’s head as he tried to lever the body off himself. “You pyjak-fucking bastard, you better not come back from this.”

Blue hands hooked under the krogan’s arm, hefting up as Avitus shoved again. The body fell onto the scrubby grass, smearing blood through the blades to mingle with the red and blue already splattered all over the buildings around them. Kovar pushed him back down when Avitus tried to heave himself up, one unyielding hand flat over the front of his armor.

“You’re hurt,” he said, mouth twisting unhappily. “You were shot in the rover when you pushed me down.”

Avitus looked down. Sure enough, there was a blackened hole burned through his chestplate, and when he reached an arm back, the exit hole suggested that the bullet had gone in at an angle and punched right back out through his carapace. “I’ll be damned. I was.”

“I should have been the one to come down here,” Kovar continued, his fingers lingering on the blue blood oozing through the bullet hole.

“Do you know how to kill a krogan without heavy artillery?” Avitus didn’t wait for a response, only pulled the hand off his chest and sat up anyways. “Relax. It missed all my major organs and it looks like it didn’t even clip any of the arteries in there. Don’t you want to find out what happened to your people here?”

The unhappy twist of Kovar’s lips deepened, but he didn’t say anything more. There was a reason he’d come out all this way, after all. Time to find out if that reason was still alive.

* * *

The unrealized pain had slowly grown into something tooth-grindingly bearable by the time they left the remains of the settlement behind. Avitus thought of his horosk longingly, but he didn’t want to risk thinning his blood out when the wound in his chest had barely scabbed over at this point. Maybe once they settled in for the night. Kovar could take watch for once.

The trap had been well set; none of the angara from this settlement were closely tied to Kadara Port, had only really traded with other angara both on and off world. They were isolated, but just easy enough to reach that the isolation hadn’t seemed dangerous. And most importantly, they were removed enough from the rest of the galaxy that it had seemed plausible that whoever Kovar was looking for had hidden away here.

There weren’t any graves—Avitus couldn’t remember what angaran funeral rites looked like anyways—and the few remains they found were old enough that they were unidentifiable. The raiders had been set up here for months at least, maybe longer. Maybe since the Exiles first left the Nexus, though he wasn’t so certain about that. But they hadn’t taken the place by force, and that was the part he found interesting enough to ignore the pain for.

Why would the angara sacrifice their own after all the years they’d spent fighting the kett?

He didn’t have enough information to make a guess. Kovar wasn’t any help, all tight-lipped and quietly furious as they uncovered more and more evidence of the betrayal. The anger settled on his features like a rock to the bottom of the river, turning him hard and statuesque. That persisted as they climbed back into the roller, detouring through a seperate exit out of the valley, and Kovar’s expression remained frozen as the sun started to dip towards the horizon.

“I suppose I should have known better.” Kovar’s voice was quiet but deep, rough with some unsaid emotion that Avitus thought he was trying to not to let leak through. “It’s been so many years since my family went missing, there was little chance that any of them were still alive. But that’s sentiment for you. Foolishness.”

That was bait. That was a dangly worm hanging off a hook, wiggling frantically in front of the maw of his own overwhelming desire to peel this little mystery apart. Avitus bit his tongue for almost a full minute before he gave into temptation and asked, “Who did you think you would find?”

“Sisters. The youngest. They were inseparable. We found bodies for most of them eventually, but those two… There was hope.” Kovar’s blank expression finally cracked, his lips curving into a frown. “Look at where it’s gotten me.”

His hip and shoulder throbbed as they hit a bump hard enough that Avitus barely suppressed a wince. He needed to deal with that wound sooner rather than later, but Kovar looked like he wanted to drive through the night. Avitus twitched his mandibles, then said, “Being a Spectre was a big deal, but it wasn’t as informed by skill as people think. Turians and salarians both have a healthy sense of nepotism, and sometimes it was about who you knew, not what you did.”

“I… see,” Kovar said, clearly not seeing at all. That was fine. He’d picked a weird place to start this tangent.

“My dad and I never saw eye to eye on most things, but we stopped talking entirely after I became one. Not because he objected to the job—the job was fine. But the turian who brought me into it was a barefaced biotic, and those are two things that most turians don’t trust. My dad always figured he was the wrong sort.” Avitus cut himself off with a quiet intake of breath, bracing a hand against the dash of the roller as it jolted again. “The thing is, my dad was right for all the wrong reasons.”

“I didn’t think you had time to get drunk when we were searching the village.” There was a hint of admiration in Kovar’s voice, which was downright insulting. This was what he got for saving the ungrateful bastard.

“I’m going somewhere with this. The _point_ is, I could tell you that I came to Andromeda because I didn’t want to be my father—doing the right things for the wrong reasons. I could tell you that’s why I quit being a Spectre. And no matter how believable that was, it would be a lie, because the only reason why I’m on this shitty sulfur-covered rock with you is because I fell in love.”

There was only silence from the other half of the roller, and when he glanced that direction, the setting sun blinded him. Kovar was a black shape outlined in fire, impossible to read, but he’d gone this far without hesitation so Avitus barreled on forward regardless.

“I fell in love, I came out here, and he died. Talk to anyone off the Nexus, they’ll tell you the same thing. Talk to half the angara out here and they’ll tell you that too. Because that’s all life is: you do stupid shit for love and someday you die.” He drummed his talons on the dash, trying not to flinch as Kovar took a corner a little too tight. “As stupid shit done for love goes, this is pretty low on the list. Don’t let it get to you.”

“That is kind of you to say,” Kovar said after a long moment, easing up on the gas as he rolled towards a small cave. One that was hopefully not occupied.

“Not really. But if it makes you happy enough to help me put medigel on this hole in my chest, I’ll take it.”

* * *

He got the message roughly two hours after stumbling home from Kralla’s Song, half on his ass because the madwoman behind the bar had gotten clever with her mixing again. Avitus was pretty sure that straight ethanol wasn’t supposed to go into the drinks like that, but it did a _lot_ to make everything else go away. That it had a secondary purpose as medical grade disinfectant was just a bonus.

It meant he was still almost too drunk to function when the terminal pinged softly, but that wasn’t quite drunk enough to keep him from hauling himself upright and checking. This wasn’t an email address he gave to many people; if they’d reached him through it, it was probably important. Shame that he couldn’t remember who the hell was on that exclusive list right now.

After the second try reading it went belly up, he carefully increased the zoom and squinted at the name signing off on it. A check of the sender information wasn’t helpful, because it was one of those angaran personal comm addresses that was more numbers than anything else. Though he supposed that lended the whole thing a certain kind of validity.

He just couldn’t remember giving Kovar his email address.

> R.
> 
> Need your help with something. Coordinates attached. Fairly certain the original occupants aren’t around anymore.
> 
> Contact me if you find out anything.
> 
> \- Kovar

“Well, what the fuck am I suposed to do with that?” he asked out loud. There wasn’t a response, and he didn’t expect to get one, not really. But damn if that wasn’t a cryptic message with almost no hint of what he should be doing when he got there.

Avitus downloaded the coordinates, telling himself that it was just so he didn’t get the aggravating feeling of something left undone. Then he looked them up, because he was awake and skimming through Kadara’s open channels _anyways_ , so there wasn’t any point in not checking what it was all about. When that popped up an angaran settlement that had gone dark and stopped paying dues two months ago, he decided the mystery was solved and he didn’t need to think about it anymore.

Five hours later, he was on the road, swearing because there wasn’t any chance he was getting paid for this but unable to let it sit.

For his troubles, they punched about a dozen holes in his roller, singed the absolute hell out of the armor on his legs, and died messily when he finally lost his temper and decided to handle things personally. Pirates, he discovered as he was searching the bodies, and not particularly bright ones. They’d targeted this village because most of the angara in it were hostile towards outsiders but poor fighters; no one from Kadara Port had built up personal connections to them, and no one had bothered to come chase down the protection money they hadn’t been paid.

Pretty shit deal, considering that the protection had amounted to squat, but that was par for the course for groups like the Outcasts. The only thing that gave Avitus pause was the datapad in one of the rooms, hidden under one of the cots the pirates hadn’t claimed. Whichever angara had lived there was long dead, but their fingerprints lingered in the encryption that took him almost four days to crack.

Resistance cells. Resistance networks. Resistance members, listed by name and familial affiliation.

No wonder Kovar was interested in this doomed little village. Would it have killed him to just _ask_ for the information? Or had he been under the impression that this wasn’t anything more than a hit and run? Avitus could say with certainty that the pirates hadn’t found this, but he couldn’t tell if they’d been looking for it.

Not his problem to solve. But he mentally erased another tick from the scoreboard in his head, moving it from ‘pirate’ to ‘Resistance’ with a sense of unease.

> You could give me more of a heads up next time. You’re lucky I found this at all.
> 
> Sending the key in a separate message.
> 
> Pay me.
> 
> \- Avitus

His mistake, he figured out later, was in replying at all. If he’d been smart and sensible and all those things he really wasn’t, he should’ve let it lie. Kovar wanted to know what was up with those dead angara? He could come out and investigate himself. Hire a different gun to take him out there.

But he hadn’t let it lie, and when the credits came through, they were clean. No tricks, no hoops to jump through, just enough money to cover his fees for the month so Kaetus would get off his back about joining up again. Avitus paid his dues, sulked around in Kralla’s Song for a few days, and eventually decided that he needed something to keep himself busy. Something that wasn’t drinking. Or wasn’t _just_ drinking, at least.

Which meant that predictably, the first thing he saw when he booted up his terminal was another message from Kovar’s personal address.

> Wondered if you knew anything about this group. Pictures attached.
> 
> Are you still drinking?
> 
> \- K

The smart and sensible thing to do _now_ would be to ignore the message entirely. What was that saying again—the best time to start something was yesterday, the second best time was now? Well, now he had a chance to ignore Kovar and the bullshit he was inevitably going to drag Avitus into. All he had to do was stick to it.

So he looked into the group. Traced their shipping lines back to some of the raiders that had set up on what was supposed to be home, once upon a time. Traced some of their other shipping lines to some Outcasts that weren’t all that happy with the way Sloane ran her ship, especially when they didn’t get the perks they were hoping for. Tied it all up in a bow and hunted out the names of their angaran contacts, just to prove that he could.

It was old work, familiar work, and yet nothing at all like what he’d done for the Council. There had been an authority backing him then, the same way there had been an authority backing up his reckless hunt for Macen when he’d crashed into Andromeda. This time, it was just him—his wits, his trigger finger, his reflexes against the amorphous shape of a criminal organization that Avitus was just starting to see the edges of.

For the first time since he’d woken up alone, it felt almost like living again. And that was enough of a betrayal that he’d locked himself up in the shuttle for almost a week straight, trying to outrun the agony that wanted to rip his heart to shreds.

> Still drinking. Sending key in a separate message. You need to do some legwork of your own, mine are getting tired.
> 
> Do you ever wonder why we’re here? What the point of living is?
> 
> Other than alcohol, obviously.
> 
> \- A.

He sent the key for the decryption two days later, then found a group that was going to try _farming_ of all the idiotic things and agreed to help them set up somewhere the adhi wouldn’t imediately swarm them. They had their own shuttles and prefabbed outpost building materials, which meant they were at least slightly better prepared than most, but the fact that they still needed a hired gun for protection…

Their odds weren’t worth betting on, by his reckoning.

It kept him busy. It kept him distracted, which is what he really wanted. It kept him from thinking about Macen’s brilliant mind and the way he wouldn’t have been able to let things lie, the way he would have taken their filtration system to bits and then put it back together again, a thousand times better than before.

Avitus wasn’t a builder. He couldn’t create things, couldn’t fix things, couldn’t do anything other than sit back and listen to the love of his life die. And sick as it was, he regretted not saving that recording. Sometimes regretted turning down the job, just because it might have been one last tie to Macen, no matter how tenuous.

He helped the turian settlers establish their own plot and wished them all the luck in growing edible food on a planet not meant for them, then left the entire community of suckers behind once they looked like they were comfortable and about to invite him in. Not his barrel. Not his pyjaks. Not his problem, even if he’d taken the time to outline the most likely attack routes from raiders and program some limited defense systems into the prefabbed fencing.

> I thought you were here because you had plotted a course and set yourselves on it, no matter the cost. No matter what the existing inhabitants had to say either, I might add. But I feel like that’s not the answer you’re looking for.
> 
> I am alive because there are things that must be done and only I can do them. Some days, I can even believe that.
> 
> What do you do to get through the day when you can’t drink?
> 
> \- K

He read the message, looked at the bottle of tavum he’d picked up on a whim and certainly _not_ because he was feeling lonely and morose about a client he’d had weeks ago, and decided to be honest. Because at this point, he didn’t have it in himself to lie anymore.

> Find something to drink anyways, usually. Or something else to distract me.
> 
> Sloane’s not working with your raiders. They’re being careful to avoid her notice. Thought you might find that interesting.
> 
> \- A

And by then, like every bad decision he’d ever made, this one became a habit too.

One week, it was scraping the emails of Outcasts to check which ones had ties with the group that had been so diligently avoiding Sloane’s gaze.

> The angara argue over everything. I’m sure you’ve noticed. It means that even when I think I have nothing to do, there’s usually a person or five waiting to disagree with me. Maybe that makes it easier.
> 
> I have a list of names attached.
> 
> \- K

The next, he’d gone and passed exactly two of those names on up to Kaetus, just to see what the reaction was. Swift, brutal, uncompromising. But not, Avitus noticed, guilty; there wasn’t a trace of coverup in the executions, only retaliation for wrongs committed against the organization.

> People argue with me all the time too, but mostly it’s just because they’re trying to get me to do something I have no intention of doing. Amazing, how deaf certain turians can become when one of us decides to buck the command structure.
> 
> Four Outcasts. One used to be the Charlatan’s. Three unaccounted for, so I’ll need to dig deeper. Kaetus is getting sloppy.
> 
> \- A

He took on a job leading a few angara to one of their settlements out of boredom, but regretted it almost immediately when it ended up with a week of barely-hidden hostility directed towards him. It wouldn’t matter if he told them the truth: that he wasn’t an Outcast or a member of the Collective, that this was half altruism and half selfish desire for something different, that he had no intention of leaking their coordinates to the first group of pirates that asked. The only reason why they’d turned to him was desperation.

Kadara was a planet full of desperate people. Avitus was beginning to find the whole damn place exhausting.

> Coordinates attached. Take care with these.
> 
> I wonder sometimes if the fighting will ever end. It seems like as soon as we fix one problem, ten more spring up in its place. Kadara is hardly the worst of it, but it’s nearly impossible to get any information out.
> 
> Did I ever thank you for your well-timed rescue of me?
> 
> \- K

They rigged the place to blow. Avitus examined the bombs, the timing mechanism, and most importantly, the alarms he’d disabled long before approaching the building. Considering the grisly remains of the Resistance soldiers rotting away inside, he had the feeling he knew exactly why the pirates had been extra careful with this one.

> You paid me, which is close enough. And the company wasn’t half bad. Considering how awful most people are, that’s high praise. What happened to your last contact here?
> 
> Pictures attached. No identification. Tried to keep them as clean as possible, in case you need to contact families.
> 
> Someone tipped them off.
> 
> \- A

The reply he got was almost instant, a novelty that Avitus marveled at for almost a solid minute before reading the message.

> Sloane Kelly happened. I’m cleaning house.
> 
> Be safe.
> 
> \- K

Well, he probably should have guessed that much. Avitus sighed, powering the terminal down, then pushed himself up to check the controls on his shuttle. He liked the thing to be spaceworthy, just in case he ever got the urge to cut and run, but using it as an apartment meant making sure all the environmental controls hadn’t degraded in the meantime. It would be his luck to clear atmo and then find out that the temperature controls weren’t working.

That ate up almost an hour of his time, especially once he found an electrical fault that needed to be fixed as soon as possible. The last time he’d done anything close to electrical engineering had been nearly two decades ago, and it was only through copious swearing and half-fogged memories of Macen’s tinkering that he got it fixed. It was a good reminder that he’d let other things slide too, so caught up in chasing the threads of this miniature conspiracy that he’d forgotten to be wrapped up in his own head instead. He needed some of the parts he liked to keep on hand for his guns and his food stores were looking just low enough to make him nervous.

Haggling with the vultures that traded in Kadara Port burned through a few more hours, and by the end of it, he had enough dry goods to last him through the end of the month. Nothing inspiring, but avoiding starvation was good enough for him. He hid it all throughout his shuttle, never leaving more than a week’s worth of rations stored in the same place, then checked the terminal.

Nothing.

Avitus sat there for longer than he wanted to admit, feeling stupid and annoyed with himself for checking in the first place. Kovar might have been friendly in his own reserved way, but he’d never messaged without a purpose. Considering how long internal investigations took, he probably wouldn’t be getting in touch any time in the next fortnight. Just because he’d started to look forward to those emails wasn’t a good reason to get upset that there wasn’t another one waiting.

“You’re an idiot,” he said out loud, before locking his guns up and heading back out again. If he stayed in, he’d just start ruminating on the things he couldn’t change. Better to find something more purposeful to do.

Tartarus was packed full of people and Avitus noticed the event sign just quickly enough to escape before someone could demand his cover charge. He was doubly annoyed as he made his way back to the top level of the port, dodging past people heading for the elevator and whatever dubious entertainment was promised in the slums. The few residents still clinging to hope down there couldn’t be happy about it.

Kralla’s Song was blissfully empty in comparison, tables shoved together for some impromptu poker tournament but the people inside quiet enough to be ignored. He made his way to the bar and its empty stools, holding up one finger when Umi glanced his way.

“Starting slow tonight, Rix?” she asked, pouring his usual and pushing it towards him.

“Pacing myself. You’ve got a docile bunch in here tonight.” He could tell, because she also had a screen up playing one of the Nexus newsfeeds. If there were any volatile Exiles in the bar, she wouldn’t have bothered—breaking up fights was her least favorite part of the job, and the Nexus was guaranteed to cause a fight.

“All my problem children are downstairs, breaking someone else’s bar for once.” She sneered, not quite at him, then propped her hip up against the counter. “He always looks like he’s three seconds away from pulling a gun on the Pathfinder. Some days I wish he would, just for fun.”

“Who?” None of this crowd, who’d probably shit themselves if Ryder showed up. Not _him_ , because he might hate her some days but it was never enough to really do something about it. (And he knew, when he wasn’t deep in his cups, that it wasn’t her fault that she was alive and Macen wasn’t.)

“That Evfra. Makes you wonder what kind of golden tongue she has, since she’s got him _and_ Sloane wrapped around her finger.” Umi made a crude gesture, then waved towards the screen. “Recording’s three days old, so if he ever did, we’d know before they broadcast it. But when it does, I want to see it in person.”

Avitus glanced up, more to be polite than because he actually cared about the potentially murderous leader of the Resistance. Then froze, because he knew that angara, recognized the mottled coloring of his skin and the sharp, contained motion of his gestures. His heart started to pound, the angara still turned slightly away from the camera, just enough that Avitus could deny it a few seconds longer, and then someone called for his attention from just out of view and—

Through the feed, Evfra’s gaze met his, ice blue eyes marred only by the doubled scars cutting down his face.


	2. Chapter 2

He wrote out half a dozen accusatory emails and deleted every single one when checking them over for spelling mistakes became too exhausting for how drunk he was. The fact that Kovar—Evfra—whatever the fuck he was called—couldn’t know about his revelation didn’t help; it felt like the floor had been yanked out from under his feet, like he was in freefall, like being on that Natanus and realizing that _no one_ could have survived in the frigid vacuum that filled it. Ridiculous, caring so much when he’d guessed that the angara was lying about something from the start.

And really, it was just confirming the theory he’d already been building. Avitus had realized weeks ago that this wasn’t the average pirate or failed revolutionary, he’d just been ignoring the evidence in front of his face. It made things simpler at the time.

It took almost eight days for Evfra to get back in contact again, and the message he sent was even more terse than the last one.

> Arriving at dawn. Need to take care of this one in person.
> 
> \- K

Great. He debated not showing up to the docks at all, just finding a nice corner in Tartarus and drowning himself in turian whiskey instead, but whatever stupid urge drove him to spit in Kaetus’s face the first time took hold again. When Evfra stepped out of his shuttle (no longer covered in scorch marks but showing signs of new damage, the coldly analytical part of his brain noted) his face was covered again.

A bottle dangled from Avitus’s fingers, talons hooked just right on the ridge where the cap was screwed on tight. The funny thing was, Evfra wouldn’t know that a little over a week ago, Avitus would’ve come up to meet him dead sober. Funny.

“If you’ve got the coordinates, I’ve got the wheels,” he said, ignoring the Outcast guards giving them the stink eye. If Evfra never stepped foot in the topside city, he wasn’t going to be forced to give up his weapons. They could suck it up.

“I have them.” Evfra moved towards the elevators without hesitation, leaving unsaid that they couldn’t discuss things further _here_. There was a reason all of their messages had been devoid of context—he trusted his skills with technology only so far, and nothing they had to say was safe for enemy eyes and ears.

Had a way of making a guy feel unappreciated though. He stalked after Evfra, leaning against the wall of the elevator as they descended with a couple of human mercenaries—not Outcasts, which just made them even more untrustworthy. They broke off in the slums, heading for the gates, but Avitus didn’t lead him towards the last place he’d stashed the roller. He could feel Evfra’s quizzical gaze on his back, but the angara didn’t question it as Avitus walked along the cliff face that soared high above them.

“You have a shuttle?” Evfra asked as they rounded an outcropping and came upon the beat up thing Avitus had been living in. The roller was parked out in front of it, covered by a tarp so it wouldn’t be damaged by some of the stray acidic rain that cropped up in Kadara.

“Wasn’t going to pay out the nose for a place up there,” Avitus said, jerking his thumb back towards the port. “And the slums are a risky place to hole up anyways. That’s why so many settlers decide to chance their luck outside the walls if they can get the materials for it.”

“Is there a reason why we travel over ground and not through the air?” The faint surprise in his voice had morphed into studied neutrality which was… about what Avitus had expected after opening the door to his shuttle. He kept things neat and impersonal on the inside, the occasional stray bottle aside.

“One: I don’t want my house shot down. Two: same reason you don’t drop by on your shuttle, I suspect.” He pulled the rifle off the wall, hooking it over his shoulder, then pulled a bandolier of grenades down as well. This wasn’t going to be a friendly visit.

“Hm.” Evfra’s gaze dragged over the stacked crates of food, the datapads piled by the terminal he only turned on when he was expecting a message, the half-open door between the piloting console and the bulk of the shuttle. One of the benches had been retrofitted into a bed. These things weren’t made for living in, but Avitus was pretty good at thriving in adverse conditions.

Tempting to ask if this was what the leader of the Resistance had expected from a washed up drunk, but Avitus resisted the urge. He was worried the answer would be ‘yes’.

“Don’t try and visit without me,” Avitus said as he shut the door, punching in the code to arm all the nasty little traps he’d set up his first night on Kadara. “It’ll go poorly for you.”

“Yes, I can see that.” Evfra looked at the bottle Avitus was still holding, then turned to climb into the driver’s seat of the roller, moving with much more ease than he had the first time. “You didn’t bring anything personal from your old galaxy?”

“Did. He was on the Natanus.” Avitus climbed up into the passenger’s seat, popping his whiskey bottle open.

Evfra had the sense not to ask anything further.

Like last time, he tugged his rofjinn into a more natural position once they were well away from the city. It folded around his neck like it was meant to, like it had in the broadcast Avitus had seen him in. The fabric looked soft, and he was dangerously tempted to ask all kinds of inappropriate questions about it—who had given it to him, was it a gift from the dead family he thought he could find, was there another secret hidden away where Avitus couldn’t see, a lover or a wife or something more intimate than either of those things?

He wanted to drag his talons over those scars on Evfra’s face and ask about them too. Ask what it was like to lead his people in the face of certain destruction, the way that Avitus had pointedly chosen not to. And then all the other inappropriate things that he’d been half-tempted to ask back when Evfra was still _Kovar_ , a little mysterious but still a kindred soul, someone Avitus had the thought of sharing a bed with for just a second. Just long enough to feel like an asshole.

Probably it was his punishment for thinking about it in the first place. Not that Macen would have cared, because Macen was demonstrably too fucking good for this universe, but it felt like a betrayal anyways. It had been somewhere between a year and six hundred and thirty five years since he’d last seen Macen’s face, but that scar was barely any more healed than the one in his chest now. 

Every direction his thoughts went was a bad one. He drank, because sometimes drinking helped him outrun them, then drank because Evfra kept giving him _looks_ and some stupid, petty part of him wanted to tarnish what little respect the angara had for him. Avitus had worked very hard to make sure no one looked to him to solve problems anymore. The fact that Evfra made him _want_ to be the kind of person who solved problems was offensive.

“This group isn’t as far out as the last one we encountered,” Evfra said eventually, watching the way Avitus very carefully set the half-empty bottle in the door of the roller. “We should be there some time tomorrow, if we don’t drive through the night.”

“The lights on the roller aren’t fantastic,” Avitus replied, settling back into his seat to doze for a few minutes. The rifle settled easily into the crook of his elbow, even if he was a little further gone than he’d normally be with a weapon. Doubtful that they’d run into trouble so quickly.

“And I would prefer not to give them forewarning.” Evfra fell silent again as he navigated between stagnant pools that hadn’t been filtered by the activated vault yet, the smell of sulfur rising with the steam clouds that billowed around them. The roller practically purred under his hands now, in a way that Avitus didn’t want to think about for too long.

Damn, maybe he shouldn’t have tucked the bottle away. But he hadn’t packed another one because he’d chosen to come with Evfra on a pissed off whim, only had enough food and ammo in the roller to last a couple days, and none of it technically suitable for Evfra (who had been smart enough to bring his own bag, at least.) All of this had been a whim, from the very beginning. Sooner or later, he’d have to learn to stop going with his gut.

“I have to wonder,” Evfra started again, his voice slow and careful like he was feeling his way across uncertain ground, “why you started down this path. Someone with your skill and ability would be in high demand, and even your Exiles were once part of the Nexus.”

“I don’t know, Evfra,” Avitus said tiredly, staring at the mirror through the window. “Why don’t you tell me?”

The silence this time was much heavier, laden with hidden meaning and all the lies between them. They passed into a tunnel, the inky darkness falling over them like a blanket, then slowed as Evfra reached an alcove, the headlights catching on the curve of stone as he swung into it and out of sight of anyone else passing through.

“Is this the part where you kill me?” Avitus asked, bemused.

“No.” Just enough light reflected off the wall for him to see the way Evfra’s hands reached out, lifting the butt of his rifle and sliding it carefully out of his unresisting grip. The safety on it engaged, then Evfra set it carefully across the bags in the back. “If I was intending to kill you, I wouldn’t do it alone.”

“I’m not sure if I should be flattered by that or not.” The part of his brain that was, even now, running threat assessments and deciding whether or not angaran skin was thin enough at the throat for claws alone to gouge through wanted him to fight his way out of the roller. The part of him that was just so sick and tired of this entire farce held that bit of his brain down and kept his muscles still as Evfra reached up towards his face.

Warm, calloused fingers pressed to the curve of his jaw, dipping down to the leathery skin at his neck, in that vulnerable junction between faceplates and the armored shell of his carapace. They paused just before the soft cloth that protected most of it, then trailed back up again to inspect the fretful twitching of his mandibles. Avitus was barely breathing, his eyes wide in the dark as he tried to catch any glimpse of Evfra’s thoughts on his face.

“When did you realize?” Evfra asked, the darkness muffling his voice as much as it did everything else. Sensitized to the touch as he was now, Avitus could sense something almost like static humming under Evfra’s skin, washing over him like the tingle just before lightning struck.

“A week ago. That news broadcast from Aya, about the colonial agreements or whatever—I could have figured it out sooner, but I wasn’t looking into you. Professional courtesy.” His mouth was dry, the words falling out on habit more than conscious thought. Evfra was still touching him.

“That makes me feel a little better,” Evfra said, and now that his eyes had adjusted to the light, Avitus could see the rueful cast to his features. “Otherwise I would have felt ridiculous for carrying on with the pseudonym.”

“Probably for the best if you do. Sloane monitors communications on and off Kadara, which is why I always send the decryption code in a separate message.” And then, because he couldn’t keep a handle on his wayward tongue any longer, he said, “You know I don’t have lips, right? If that’s what you were considering. Kissing, not a very turian thing.”

There was a long, heavy pause. Then Evfra’s fingers withdrew, the wash of static leaving with them, and Avitus nearly lunged out of his seat to keep that hand from going too far. It ended up with his body pinning Evfra’s to the seat, one arm braced against the driver’s window as his other hand hooked in the straps around Evfra’s chest.

They stared at each other in the dark, Evfra’s icy blue eyes dark with how large his pupils were, the reflected light off the cave walls turning everything a worn-thin sort of grey. Slowly, carefully, Avitus lowered his head until they were touching, forehead to forehead, angaran skin to turian carapace.

“I didn’t say,” he continued a little breathlessly, “that I would _object_ to it.”

“How much do you know about angara physiology?” Evfra asked, hands lifting to press at the underside of his jaw again, his palms hot where they curled around his throat. From anyone else, it would be a threat. He wasn’t convinced that it wasn’t one this time too.

“I know how to kill you, but I haven’t exactly cared enough to learn much else.” That static hum was rushing through him again, from Evfra’s hands to his heart in a feedback loop of electricity that _probably_ wasn’t good for him. But here in the darkness, that didn’t seem to matter, the way a lot of things had suddenly stopped mattering.

“Our bioelectric fields can sense minor fluctuations in many living things. It’s not only angara we can communicate with on a deeper level.” It sounded like Evfra was going breathless too, and he still hadn’t shoved Avitus off. Dangerous thing, to hope.

He dragged his sluggish thoughts back to the matter at hand, then tipped his head slightly just to feel the way Evfra’s fingers shifted around his throat. “You know, lie detector tests haven’t been admissible as evidence for literal centuries to me.”

It startled a soft snort of laughter out of Evfra, one that was followed by a muttered exhalation that sounded _almost_ like ‘fuck it’. Then his hands were sliding upwards, thumbs pushing up into the sensitive joint where his mandibles met his jaw, and Avitus couldn’t help the breathy noise of want he made.

Evfra’s mouth followed the path his hands left, lips and tongue trailing over the exposed skin in a way that was completely alien. Avitus tipped his head back, leaving his throat vulnerable—more vulnerable than he’d already left it—and moved his hand towards something more productive than just uselessly grabbing as Evfra's mouth finally pulled away.

How long had it been? Too long and not long enough, depending on how he looked at it. His fingers fumbled with the straps around Evfra’s chest, talons catching on fabric. Evfra was sober, but his own touch was more exploratory than helpful, fingers catching in the latches of his armor and finding all the painted-over scuffs and scrapes Avitus had stopped trying to buff out. And one hand lingered at Avitus’s throat the whole time, the pad of his thumb pressed into that fragile, dangerously thin skin just under his jaw.

“Why is your shirt _like_ this?” he groused as Evfra shifted into a more comfortable sprawl underneath him, one muscular leg moving to bracket his hips.

“You’d have more luck just working on my pants,” Evfra said, his fingers industriously digging into the seams of armor at Avitus’s hip. The low thrum of static between them fluctuated with the motion, pulsing to the soft inrush of breath when Evfra finally got access to more of his skin.

“You have the most nonsensical—” It was like being young again, all clumsy groping and useless grinding. He really was too old for this. “Assume for the moment that I’m not smart enough for your clothes.”

“It's not your brain that's the problem,” Evfra muttered, finally pulling his hand away from Avitus's neck to finish the job he’d started. The electric charge between them dampened, but it was still there, sparking as Evfra's fingers far more deftly undid hidden seams and cleverly made latches.

Avitus buried his talons into the fabric of the driver's seat, his other arm still braced against the pockmarked glass of the window. Doing something like this with someone new was—years behind him. _Centuries_ behind him, hah, but he remembered enough to keep his hands carefully clear of Evfra's skin, the bony plate of his brow digging into Evfra’s temple as Avitus watched him tug both of them free. He was half-mast, stiffening up under the calluses of Evfra's fingers, and Evfra was—

“I should have done this the first time we met,” Avitus said, thrusting into the fist curled around him as he watched Evfra's cock bob with the motion. It was flushed, dark at the tip already beading with precum.

“You think I would have let you?” Evfra’s voice was amused but also fogged with lust, his thigh tightening against Avitus’s hips as he rocked his own up to grind their cocks together. His fingers flexed, curling more heavily as he trapped the two of them against each other, a soft groan from beneath Avitus matched by the one that spilled out of his own throat.

Threads popped under his talons as he dug his fingers into the back of the seat, his other hand hauling Evfra’s leg up higher as Avitus rocked into the tight pressure. “I can be convincing.”

“In that case,” Evfra said, his fist jerking around them, other hand dragging Avitus’s head lower so he could mouth at his throat, “convince me.”

* * *

There wasn’t a krogan this time. There _were_ four angara, angara that Evfra recognized if the grim, set look on his face was anything to go by, and more of the assorted scum that floated to the top of Kadara’s criminal enterprises. A few more ex-Outcasts. A lot more rogue Collective members, cut free in the wake of Sloane’s renewed hold on the port. Avitus logged the names and faces of the ones with anything recognizable on them, just in case he could dig up something new with it back on the shuttle.

“Skkut,” Evfra said eventually, crouching and pressing a palm to the cold cheek of one of the dead angara. “The one I was looking for isn’t here.”

From his spot near one of the terminals, Avitus grunted in acknowledgement. “They didn’t know you were coming _here_ , but they knew you were on Kadara. I’ve got correspondence with someone back at the port here, no names attached. It’ll take me a couple days to track them down.”

Evfra swore again, his fist thumping into the metal wall with a dull thud. “And more of my people die to this traitor every day they’re running free. How did they know?”

“Doesn’t say h—Wait. Looks like your shuttle was tagged leaving Aya and the signature broadcasts in local range. Maybe two hundred yards or so.” He skimmed up through more messages, half of them nonsensical because his decryption program hadn’t finished running through them yet. “Seems like the lookout hangs around the docks on the regular anyways. Probably human. Might still be under Sloane’s nose, actually.”

Now there was a tidbit to hand to Kaetus as either a bribe or an apology for how many guards he’d been pissing off recently. Avitus toyed with how he could present the information, then mentally dismissed it as unimportant for now. Kaetus, for all that he could be blindly loyal (and sometimes, just blind; turians were not naturally adept at subterfuge) wasn’t stupid. He’d want to know how Avitus had come upon this discovery, and then he’d want to know why he was looking into it in the first place, and he still hadn’t fed any of his crackpot theories about Evfra’s origins to them.

The ex-Roekaar one had a certain appeal to it though. Maybe he could spin it like that. Crazy alien hunting Exiles down, except Avitus had figured out that those Exiles pretty much deserved to be hunted down in the first place.

“I can’t afford to lose them a third time,” Evfra said grimly, straightening up before walking over to look at the terminal as well. His body was warm as he bent over Avitus’s shoulder, one of the straps on his chest torn by an errant talon. “Which means that I may have to take this fight off Kadara.”

“You spooked them, so they probably won’t come back anyways,” Avitus said, tearing his gaze away from the visual reminder of what they’d done. What he’d done. Focus on the mission, care about that later. That was the ticket.

Evfra growled in a way that made Avitus’s hindbrain sit up and take notice, and he stomped on the thought before it could fully form.

“Look, the easiest thing to do is let me handle the Kadara side and while you take care of the rest off-planet.” With a careless gesture at the terminal, Avitus finished downloading the rest of the messages and files. “They’ll have eyes on me, but as far as anyone knows, I’m just the stupid drunk you hired so you wouldn’t drive into a geyser at some point. It’s pretty obvious that they aren’t expecting me to actually help out.”

“You really think that no one will suspect that you’re working for me?” Evfra asked doubtfully. It was almost sweet how much faith he had in Avitus, considering that he’d also seen him down half a bar’s worth of alcohol while on the job.

“I don’t work for people,” he shot back, pushing up out of the chair and away from the distracting possibility of taking Evfra’s clothes off. “That’s my whole thing. I take jobs on a whim, fuck off when I’m tired of it, and people leave me alone. Everyone knows that.”

“Consider me no one, then.” The look Evfra gave him was long and thoughtful, seeing more than Avitus was comfortable with him seeing. Then he turned his gaze towards the bodies again, and it grew a little easier to breathe.

“Well, I figured as much. They won’t be expecting you to communicate with me regularly either. I don’t give out my contact information.” He paused, midway through compiling the information in an easy to send data packet. “How did _you_ get it, anyways?”

“I mentioned you by name to the Pathfinder and she offered it to me,” Evfra said offhand, starting to pull the angara out of the room.

The floor dropped out from under him and came back up swinging. Bad enough to have Ryder up in his business _again_ , bad enough to remember why she had his email address at all when Macen was dead and the whole mission fruitless, but worst of all was thinking about Evfra sitting behind a computer screen and knowing him, knowing _about_ him, while Avitus had… nothing. Hadn’t bothered to dig deeper, even as curious as he was, because digging deeper had only gotten him burned before.

Of course Evfra wouldn’t have that same tendency to shy away from the possibility of hurt. And it wasn’t like he was the only one that knew the whole sordid affair—Macen’s position as Pathfinder, and Avitus’s position as his second, had been a matter of public record. Once news about the Natanus broke, everyone knew who the fuck he was.

But. He’d let himself get caught up in the fantasy of not being _him_ , the same way he’d allowed himself to be dragged into the lie that was Kovar. 

“Oh.” That didn’t sound much like his voice, and the tone of it caused Evfra to glance up sharply. “Don’t look at me like that. I just wasn’t expecting her to still have it.”

“You don’t seem fond of her,” Evfra offered cautiously after a moment.

“She did her best.” It was damning with faint praise, but everything else he could say was hurtful, untrue, or a combination of the two. And he wasn’t nearly drunk enough to stop caring about that fact and say it anyways.

Wisely, Evfra dropped the line of conversation. The next time he spoke was to ask for Avitus’s aid in setting up a pyre; like the Nexus survivors, exiled or otherwise, the angara burned their dead now. Between the scarcity of resources on their planets and the looming threat of the kett, digging burial mounds was a pointless endeavor. There had been other rites once, Evfra told him as they stacked the bodies in careful rows, armor removed and only cloth between them and the elements.

Would have been easier with one of those sulfurous lakes around, but between the location of the base and the steady work the vault had been doing, the truly toxic ones were too far away for the effort.

“Look,” Avitus said when the work was done, the smoke starting to rise against a backdrop of one of those gorgeous Kadara sunsets, “we need to be on even ground here. That means honesty, not even lies of omission anymore. I’m good at dodging Sloane Kelly, but not when I don’t know _why_ I’m dodging her.”

“You want us to be honest with each other?” Evfra asked, a wry twist on the words that said a lot about his opinion on the matter. Then some of the humor faded as he continued, “You’re right. I’d rather not get you killed through ignorance.”

“Well, don’t go _that_ far. None of those idiots in Kadara could put me down, ignorant or not.” He tossed his rifle into the back of the roller, swinging up into the driver’s seat before Evfra could make his way around. At the look of surprise on his face, Avitus added, “I need you to give me a proper rundown of the whole situation. It’ll be easier to do that if I’m driving.”

Whatever opinion Evfra had about his probable driving ability, he kept it to himself in favor of climbing into his own seat and settling his gun within easy reach. “I suppose it would be easiest to start at the beginning, but I don’t know when the conspiracy began. Sometime around when the Moshae was first taken from us, I’d estimate.”

In fact, there was a lot that Evfra wasn’t sure about. The problem was, as far as Avitus could tell, that the Resistance was still unused to being a singular movement; the militaries the angara had, such that they were, had been decimated in initial conflicts with the kett, and the cells of Resistance had never operated with cohesive (or, frequently, competent) leadership prior to Evfra’s rise to power. It meant that while Evfra’s meteoric rise in popularity gave him a certain kind of ability to force disparate groups to work together, he also had scattered blocs of bitter, angry Resistance soldiers who didn’t care for his leadership. In some ways, the successes of _Evfra’s_ version of the Resistance made it worse—for the kind of person who believed they could do better, having their failures rubbed in their face would pour salt into the wound.

More importantly, the angara didn’t agree on _anything_. They’d been wounded by infighting long before the kett arrived, and crippled by it long after when two leaders could have ten different opinions on ways to move forward. There were a lot of options for dissension in the ranks, no matter how tight a ship Evfra tried to run.

The trap on Kadara had been the first time the enemy showed their hand enough for Evfra to spot it, but it hadn’t been the first time they’d done… something. Leaked Resistance movements to pirates. Tipped off the Roekaar when rations or medical supplies were supposed to be delivered to far-flung bases. Compromised cells of soldiers when they were out of contact with the main Resistance force. Not to the kett, _never_ to the kett, but the other predators of the galaxy were fair game. Things that went unnoticed in the general flood of small tragedies that plagued the angara, until Evfra had a reason to look at them harder.

Kadara wasn’t the only planet he was looking for them on, but it had been his best bet. It was a planet of exiles, angaran and Nexus both, and the Resistance had never established a real foothold on it. Evfra’s last contact had gone dark some time ago, probably eliminated in one of the purges Sloane instituted after the Charlatan’s death, and without those eyes, Evfra hadn’t been able to keep tabs on the angara still trapped here. That, at least, was a problem Avitus could solve.

The rest was a little bit trickier.

“They won’t come back here,” he said as he pulled into a cave and checked for wildlife. Thankfully, it was empty. “Not after you got this close. Third time’s the charm, so I’m guessing they’re not going to give you that chance.”

“Yes, I had come to that conclusion as well.” Evfra’s voice was grim, his movements controlled in the way of someone who wanted to vent his anger but didn’t dare do so. Or maybe had gotten too used to controlling it, if Avitus read him right—there were all sorts of rumors about Evfra flying about.

He’d have to start paying attention to them. “I’ll see what I can find. Whoever it is, they don’t have enough support to feel comfortable on planets you control, so they won’t head back into angaran space. That means sticking around here, some of the planets the pirates are mining on, and maybe Elaaden.”

“I don’t control any planets,” Evfra said irritably as he set up the camping stove, unrolling the flat set of woven blankets that passed as a cot for the angara. “Having a militia presence is hardly _controlling_. My job would be a damn sight easier if it was.”

Avitus laughed. “Yeah, every tyrant says that. Talk to your people. I’ll do the digging here. Between us, we’ll catch them.”

“A tyrant,” Evfra muttered before reaching over and hooking his hand in the collar of Avitus’s armor. “Then allow me to make some demands.”

His mouth went dry. Suddenly, the joke wasn’t quite so funny anymore, because Evfra had a way of making it _dirty_ instead. “I guess I can allow that. Might even indulge one or two of them.”

Evfra’s grip on him said that one or two was all he needed.

* * *

Neither of them were stupid. The first message Evfra sent once he was off planet was signed the exact same way as all the others before it, and Avitus kept his responses as terse as always. Far as he could tell, no one was actually monitoring his mail, but it never hurt to be careful. If Evfra’s traitor in the ranks hadn’t leaked his identity to the Outcasts before fleeing, then Avitus wasn’t going to do it through carelessness.

On a hunch, he put some feelers out about H-047c, then settled back into the center of his web to wait.

The thing he’d never told Macen (but Macen had known anyways, because he’d always been able to see right through Avitus) was that he _thrived_ in situations like this. After the blow Saren had dealt the council, he couldn’t stand the idea of being a Spectre, being Saren’s protege, and all the baggage it contained, but he’d loved the work. Hunting through the white noise and static for the single true note of the message he needed to find—that was what he was made to do. The mercenary work, the tinkering, the drinking, that was all a way to distract himself from the yawning emptiness that filled the space where a purpose needed to be.

He had a purpose again. Contrariness made him loathe to say it out loud, but he suspected Evfra could see right through him too.

Kaetus, on the other hand…

> You’re not the only one cleaning house. Think Kaetus finally figured out that someone was stealing his men.
> 
> Alcohol is cheaper than painkillers on this planet.
> 
> \- A

“Ow,” said Avitus, though it didn’t hurt nearly as much as the human probably hoped it would. The trick of it was that everyone looked at turian carapaces, turian armor, thick turian skin, and came the the conclusion that they were like krogans and naturally resilient. So they scaled their punches up, figured out what worked on the average turian, and assumed that would be enough. None of them stopped to think that maybe the average turian had less incentive to steel themselves against torture than a retired Spectre, compulsory military service or no.

“Look,” Kaetus said wearily, not fooled by the mock expression of pain and contrition, “I give you a lot of leeway. A _lot_. All I’m asking is for something in return, Rix.”

“I pay my dues,” he pointed out, wondering if it was worth the pain to make a lesson out of the dumb kids currently holding him. The Outcasts weren’t choosey, except when it came to barring angara from their ranks, and the humans Kaetus had brought along with him were bottom of the barrel.

That, more than anything else, told him that Kaetus didn’t really want to do this. Turians liked rules and order, wanted to build sense in the senseless chaos of the universe. The salarians, the humans, the asari and the krogan, even the angara—none of them could get why Kaetus was the way he was. Straight as an arrow, twice as honest, and the uncompromising right hand to Sloane Kelly, a woman who’d spit in the eye of rules and order back on the Nexus. But Avitus, and every other turian on the planet, understood.

In her own way, Sloane was incorruptible. To a man desperate for orders, she was the woman to follow. Despite that, even a devoted second-in-command could have opinions of his own, and Kaetus did his best to smooth out the rough edges for him whenever Avitus was up in Kadara Port. As long as he didn’t cause trouble, Kaetus could keep smoothing things out.

But he had been causing trouble, and even Kaetus couldn’t protect him from Sloane.

“When I passed that job on to you a couple months back, it was because I wanted some information, Rix. You took the job, gave me nothing, and since he didn’t come back, I decided not to do anything about it. But you were waiting for him at the docks, and that makes people ask questions.” Kaetus eyeballed him, mandibles twitching. He _really_ didn’t want to do this. That was interesting.

“It’d be nice if someone asked _me_ those questions instead,” Avitus said, letting the humans hold him upright. “Maybe I’d have some answers for them.”

There was a long-suffering sigh, almost certainly for the audience. Humans had a nasty habit of thinking they knew everything about anything, and they hadn’t figured out all the little nuances of turian facial expression. The five clustered around him wouldn’t be able to say anything except that their commander had beaten the tar out of a disobedient freelancer for some answers.

Good old Kaetus. Shame that he was so straightforward in his thinking otherwise, because he had the acting ability of a trained special operative but he wasn’t built for finding treachery the same way Avitus was.

“You found something out. I know you did. I’ve got reports of settlements being burnt down, some of our people left behind in those settlements, and you’re too smart to take that kind of job without doing some digging first. I just need to know what you found.”

He’d been thinking of how to frame it, because there was no way in hell he was giving Evfra’s real name up. In the end, the most romantic theory was also the one that sounded best; people liked it when he told them what they wanted to hear. The Council had been the same way. “Ex-Roekaar. Got a grudge.”

“Shit.” Kaetus looked genuinely worried for a second. “Does it look like there’s an incursion of them _here_?”

“Not as far as I could tell. He was working alone, trying to find someone, but he’s not a pirate. Cares too much about the angara, doesn’t like aliens much at all, and he’s not interested in the profit. No one was backing him up when he was here either.” The trick was in not lying. All of these were theories he’d had and discarded, and all of the evidence lined up. “Best I can figure, he hired me because he needed a guide and maybe a scapegoat if everything went wrong.”

Kaetus swore again, something low and crackling in a colonial dialect that Avitus hadn’t heard in either years or centuries depending on how he counted it. _Very_ interesting. “And our people?”

“Wrong place, wrong time? Or right place, wrong time, depending on what they were doing there.” Avitus grinned, knowing that the humans holding him upright couldn’t see it. “Maybe you should be kicking the shit out of _your_ people instead of me, Kaetus.”

“Oh believe me, I will. But I mean it, Rix—you can’t just walk around like you own the place. People start thinking they can do it too, and that gives me problems.” Kaetus jerked his chin towards the Outcasts and the sloppy, useless hold on him dropped. “Keep up on it and, dues or no dues, we’ll have to kick you out.”

“You’re not gonna do that, Kaetus,” he said, rolling his shoulder until it stopped clicking in that unhappy little way. In about an hour, he was _really_ going to start hurting.

“Really.” He didn’t sound impressed, but Avitus caught the worried little flick of his mandibles. “Why’s that, Rix?”

Avitus raised his brows in genuine surprise at the question. “Because then I won’t have a reason to play nice anymore.”

> I’d offer to send you some, but I’m not certain ours work on you. They likely wouldn’t get there regardless. Asking you to take care seems like a waste of breath, so I will not do so.
> 
> What did you find?
> 
> \- K

Kralla’s Song was busy tonight, which meant Umi had the news broadcasts off and the drinks flowing freely. Avitus claimed a spot at the bar near the balcony, which was unusual, and ordered horosk, which was not. She didn’t ask any questions, but when she thunked the bottle in front of him, she left a small datapad behind as well. He was good for it.

Everyone talked to bartenders. The trick was getting them to talk back.

> Names, no places. Might get more of that once Kaetus is done purging the ranks. Sloane’s pretty pissed off that they were operating under her nose for so long. It’s a bad day to be an Outcast without someone to vouch for you.
> 
> I’m following up on the Collective members I recognized. Looks like they were the go between for yours and the people on this planet. Ten to one, they were trading information before the shit hit the fan, and they decided to just group up officially afterwards.
> 
> I can think of a different angaran solution, provided you remember to spit.
> 
> \- A

The Outcasts were looking very strained these days, and Avitus had noticed that one of the regular dock guards was no longer regular. Depending on how many of them Sloane sniffed out, there’d be a whole lot of new heads on display soon. That was one loose end neatly tied in a bow, and a favor owed to him by Kaetus for lighting the neon sign over the dissenters in the ranks in the first place.

Now all he had to do was figure out where the Collective was working out of and whether or not it was a concerted effort to join with Evfra’s rogues as well. A couple malcontents from either side was one thing. Actual pirates were a much more dangerous matter.

> I’m sending you a list. Only a third of them are confirmed. If you can confirm the rest, I would appreciate it.
> 
> \- K

Then, moments afterwards:

> I’m not doing this over email. But the next time we see each other, I’m more than willing to demonstrate this specific biological superiority.
> 
> \- K

And Avitus had a warm, fuzzy feeling about that all the way up until he remembered that Macen had been dead for barely a year. Then everything came crashing down.

The problem was that he craved something to do while avoiding actual responsibility. If he’d taken the job as Pathfinder, maybe he would have been so focused on that pile of minor disasters that he wouldn’t have fallen into this trap. At the same time, he _wasn’t_ a leader, he _wasn’t_ built for this the way Macen had been—he’d agreed to it, because Macen had wanted things that way, and he’d been so damn secure in the knowledge that they’d reach the galaxy together that he hadn’t considered the ‘what if’ that made a line of succession necessary. Avitus wasn’t Pathfinder material.

But he needed something to fill his time, and the mystery of Evfra had turned into a conspiracy tailor-made for his particular skillset, and then he’d let himself get attached, interested, hungry for a touch as much as a smile, and—

The _problem_ was that Macen would have wanted him to move on. Fair enough, Avitus felt the same way once; they’d had that conversation a dozen times, between one nasty job and another, all the way up until he’d retired out of shame for what his mentor had done. They’d agreed, back in the bad old days, that the thing that made them _work_ was that it wasn’t forever, that someday they’d die out of sync and meet up again somewhere else, whenever their atoms collapsed and remade themselves into someone new. It hadn’t been the common turian view, but it had been one of those things they were in perfect agreement about.

Except that Avitus had always planned on dying first. It didn’t matter that Macen wouldn’t have cared, because he was never supposed to be the one to go ahead. In a perfect universe, Macen would be alive and well and maybe grieving but probably moving on, Avitus a fond memory, the Natanus whole.

Funny how, after getting to Andromeda, he couldn’t picture a galaxy with both of them alive anymore.

Blowing through a bottle of tavum was not the mature, emotionally responsible way to handle this revelation, but it turned out that he could pour it into damn near about anything and the taste wasn’t so bad. He didn’t send any messages he might later regret. He didn’t start any barfights either. Drunk, stupid Avitus wasn’t a barfight kind of man. But he did get _damn_ drunk down in Tartarus, where the dregs of Kadara’s gangs hung out, where the Charlatan had once worked out of, and he listened.

The problem of Evfra was something he’d deal with another day. Evfra’s traitor was much easier to figure out. Especially once he got the bartenders talking a little more.

> I have coordinates. Three ships. You’ll need teams for the other two. 
> 
> \- A


	3. Chapter 3

The shuttle got a very careful pre-flight look over before he dared take it off planet. He was useless dead and there were only a few ways to end up deader than the vacuum of space. Since he didn’t have it docked up at the port, he didn’t have to tell anyone he was leaving, which made the rest of the checklist much easier to handle.

Once he was well into deep space and had the coordinates for H-047c plugged into the shuttle’s autopilot, he booted up the email terminal again. Evfra was efficient, responding within the hour with a time and date. He’d be taking the flagship, he’d said, and had assembled teams for the other two without anyone else in the Resistance knowing. Right now, Evfra trusted a very tiny circle of people, including the notoriously unreliable Avitus. It’d have been funny, if he hadn’t known damn well who was on the other two teams.

Alec Ryder had been an N7, and the only reason he’d never been floated as a Spectre recruit was because the Hierarchy wouldn’t stand for it. Ryder could handle herself.

Evfra could handle himself too, but Avitus felt a lot better about it if he was there. Right now, there was no one else on Evfra’s side, not the way Avitus was. He could be the beloved leader of the Resistance and still dangerously alone in a crowded room. Alone on a pirate ship with a traitor who’d already tried to kill him once? Not happening.

Not that Avitus had said any of that, but Evfra wasn’t surprised when he showed up at the rendezvous point five hours later.

“Does the Tempest have shuttles on it?” Avitus asked once their comms were up, Evfra’s sleek little ship—not the one he’d flown to Kadara—hiding behind an asteroid less than a hundred yards away from his own. The Pathfinder’s ship wasn’t in sight, but he knew it was around.

“Jaal said they would be using the escape pods to board both ships. When I asked if that would present a problem later, he said that ‘Peebee might forgive them’ and that it wasn’t an issue.” There was a thoughtful pause. “I declined to ask how they would get _off_ the ships.”

“I’m pretty sure those pods have limited flight capabilities. They should be able to make it back,” he said absently, scanning the ships for a good entry point. The shields and locks had firewalls around them, but poking around a little bit revealed that they were the defaults standard to most Nexus ships. Hard for angara to crack, childishly easy for him.

“They’re waiting for my signal. Can you make sure that we won’t be seen boarding?” Not an unreasonable question, but considering the windows that were also standard... 

“I can make sure we’re not on radar. Can’t stop them from seeing us with their eyes, unless angara have new and interesting ways to hide their ships.” He loaded up the vicious little program that would disable everything between them and the entrance. “Forty seconds before their shields go down, ten minute window until they come back up again.”

“I’ll let Jaal know. We strike as one.” The comms disconnected as Evfra’s ship slowly and carefully drifted out of the shadow of the asteroid. It was a lot more agile than Avitus’s own shuttle, but that wasn’t going to matter for long because the doors to the cargo bays had all engaged open.

A few of them disgorged supplies and at least one struggling figure. Avitus noted this in passing, then dismissed it entirely as he sped towards the flagship and rammed himself inside.

The cargo doors closed behind him a minute later, the airlock reengaging as he secured his shuttle to the bottom of the cargo bay. It wasn’t perfect, but it managed to keep him steady as he slid the door open and dropped to the floor, Evfra silently climbing out of his own ship with a weapon at hand. He gestured towards his head; after a few seconds of fiddling with his omnitool, Avitus found the channel Evfra was calling from.

“What, don’t trust the air in here?” he asked, as if he hadn’t kept his own helmet on for exactly that reason.

“The alarms haven’t gone off. Was that you as well?” Ahead of him, Evfra hauled himself up on a shipping crate, sighting in on the doors at the end of the bay. Avitus found a ladder and swung himself up to the second deck of the ship. These were ships for hauling colonists, supplies, large equipment for mining and farming and construction. Sturdy, big on the inside, but relatively spartan otherwise.

“Like I said, we have ten minutes. They probably know they’ve been attacked, but it’s even odds on whether they realized we’ve boarded yet.” He thought for a moment. “Ship like this one has three escape pods on both sides. The cargo bay is to the lower back, engine rooms on the bottom deck just ahead, cockpit and living areas all up here on the second deck. The escape pods will be accessible from both decks, but they pop out near the engines, fuck if I know why. Human design.”

“No defense systems?”

“Not by design. But these three were stolen by Exiles, converted to pirate ships, then stolen again by your rogue agent. I wouldn’t count on them being defenseless now.”

“At least we’re through the doors,” Evfra said grimly.

Avitus moved forward, popping open a wall panel and digging in its guts. There was the soft clunk of heavy tread on metal as Evfra climbed up to his level, head on a swivel as he covered every angle. It had been a while since Avitus had someone at his back on a mission. Felt nice.

Not thinking about it. He rewired the lock on the door, mechanically disengaging it and then propping it open. Maybe it would make Evfra’s traitor think twice before trying to vent the cargo bay out. The idea of losing his living space didn’t appeal to him much.

“I’m taking point,” Evfra said, moving past him with his rifle to his shoulder. After a second of internal debate, Avitus let him; he worked best in the background anyways, heroics on Kadara aside.

“So, did you ever figure out who you were looking for?” Avitus asked, keeping his voice low. The lights in the hallway were dim, the ship’s systems still recovering from the virus he’d introduced to it. It was possible that they _couldn’t_ change the defaults, that maybe this crew wasn’t as good with computers as they needed to be. That could be useful.

“A heskaarl.” Evfra didn’t elaborate on what that was and Avitus silently vowed to find a dictionary for all those troublesome little words that didn’t cross through the translator right. “Be on your guard. They’re some of our best fighters.”

“You’ll be delighted to know that I am stone-cold sober.” The sound of a door swishing open and booted feet on metal, someone running this direction. Evfra shifted to press against the wall, angling himself so he’d see the person coming into the intersection before they saw him.

Avitus pressed against the opposite wall and took aim at the door straight down the hall. The angara rounded a corner and took a bullet before she could shout for help, staggering backwards as Evfra shot her again. And when her friends burst through the door at the sound of the shots, Avitus took care of them just as quick.

“How much do you want to bet they keep the aliens on the other ships?” he asked thoughtfully, nudging the bodies out of the doorway before stepping over them. No one else coming down the halls. Whatever a heskaarl was, these three _weren’t_.

“Hah. I’d bet you a whole planet, because all three ships will have angara on them.” Evfra’s voice had gone past grim and straight into murderous. His touch was gentle as he shut the eyes of the angara he’d shot, easing her down to lie on the floor. “This was Ahnej. A linguist. Said she was taking personal time after the battle at Meridian, but members of her team thought that the loss of life there disturbed her.”

“Hated aliens?” Well, Avitus hated everyone most days, and he figured Evfra didn’t have a leg to stand on there either. _Everyone_ knew his reputation. Not that Evfra seemed to dislike him all that much, considering.

“We all did. But she didn’t leave to join the Roekaar.” The blank anonymity of Evfra’s helmet made it hard to tell what he thought when he looked at the other two, but his movements were equally gentle when he checked their pulses. “These two I don’t know as well. They were stationed on Voeld, that’s the most I can tell you.”

“Right, but what does it tell _you?_ ”

“I know who my traitor is,” Evfra said, right as the lights went out.

Avitus moved, but not quite fast enough to stop the slim angara that bolted past him. One hand came down hard on his rifle hand, caught him viciously enough that the bone creaked under the pressure. There was a soft grunt as his fingers scraped on armor, and then they were gone. The lights flickered back on again as their shadow disappeared around a corner, heading for the escape pods.

“Damn!” he snapped, launching himself forward. “They’re going to get away!”

Evfra hissed something softly behind him, but his footsteps sounded a second later, hot on Avitus’s heels as he swung around the corner, grabbed a railing and leapt down the stairs without slowing. He could see the reinforced airlock doors just through the doorway, three of them lined up neatly where the pods slotted in, and if he could just figure out which one their prey was hiding in—

He skidded to a stop at the last one, staring at the stars visible in the window. Where were the escape pods?

A door slammed, followed by the distinctive sound of an energy weapon being fired. Evfra said, “That was stupid of us.”

“How did—stealth tech?” Because if they’d cloaked just inside the door, waited for him to bolt past, and then slipped back out again, that would make sense. But he could’ve sworn that there wasn’t the recognizable shimmer that he associated with most cloaking technology, because he’d gotten very practiced at spotting that shimmer and taking care of those targets before anything else.

“Extremely fine control of electromagnetic fields. Tivaah made an art of it. He doesn’t need technology to hide himself.” The door wasn’t budging, even though Evfra’s hand rested on the panel. It _had_ been stupid of them both to rush in at the same time; Avitus should’ve known better than that.

Some Spectre you are, he thought contemptuously, then turned back to the escape pods. “Okay. Getting vented out of here won’t be _pleasant_ , but we’re both wearing helmets and I have oxygen for the next twenty minutes at least. The Tempest is right outside, and if you’ve got jump jets in that armor of yours, we can navigate back towards this ship too. Their systems should still be down.”

“That may prove an issue.” Evfra’s voice was carefully even in a way it usually wasn’t—he might not be as gregarious as the other angara, but even he usually had an undercurrent of something in his voice. Not now. Now, he was so neutral that Avitus turned back to find out how dire the problem was.

Blue blood pooled up between Evfra’s fingers as he kept pressure on the hole through his armor. The blade had gone right into the fragile layered fabric around his neck, and the only reason why he was still talking was because Tivaah’s blade had landed an inch too far left to cut a major blood vessel.

Avitus opened his mouth, mandibles flaring, then shut it again when no words came. This was a _stupid_ way to die.

“The thing Tivaah is _not_ good at,” Evfra continued in that same alarmingly even tone, “is adapting to alien computer systems. He’s not even good with angaran ones, but he can manage them well enough. So we have your ten minute window to work with.”

“Escape pods are manual in these ships. Safety feature.” And there weren’t any escape pods in the bays, which meant that when he hit that button—

Avitus flipped the safety and dropped his rifle, bolting for the first airlock door. The panel next to it came off in a second, and from there it was just a matter of slicing through the wires that connected back up to the cockpit. Every door on this ship was designed to shut and stay shut if there was a rupture somewhere in the line, because on a spaceship, the only thing more dangerous than a door that wouldn’t open was a door that _did_.

How quickly would Tivaah figure out the right button? Too soon, no matter what. Avitus severed the connections on the second door, then turned towards the third where Evfra had, with difficulty, levered the panel off. A wire sizzled as he tore it out with his bare hands, but his soles were rubber and the charge grounded itself without doing more than burning his glove.

_Now_ they had ten minutes. Maybe a little less. And he couldn’t rip out the wireless signal that would give the release code, so he needed to figure a way out of the room fast, because he was betting that the wiring in the door to the hallway was too fried to work with.

“I don’t have a SAM. Can you reach Ryder or Jaal?” It’d make things a hell of a lot easier if they could count on a rescue, but Evfra made a negative sound. “ _Damn_.”

“Both of these guns are ballistic. I’m not inclined to fire them in a small enclosed space. I’ve seen how your omniblades work, though. Could you cut through the door?” There was entirely too much blue smeared around Evfra’s fingers, and after a second, he let out a growl of frustration and yanked his helmet off before returning pressure to the hole in his neck. His pale blue skin was even paler now. Avitus didn’t like the implications of that.

“I could try but to be honest, the fumes would probably kill us before I got anywhere useful with it.” This room was an airlock, after all. Except that it also bordered the engine room, and most ships had something to vent potential fires out through, so there was bound to be…

“It may be worth the risk. Tivaah is one of my men; if he thinks he’s cornered, he won’t hesitate to destroy the ship and everyone on it. They’re trained to resist to the very end, all the better if they can eliminate the enemy on the way out.” Evfra carefully sat, a grimace crossing his face. “Your suit isn’t compromised, so you could switch to filtered air and—”

Avitus threw his helmet on the ground loud enough to cut Evfra off, then stood back to examine the panels up near the ceiling. Whatever idiot had designed the aesthetics of this ship had gone and concealed a vent in the ridged wall paneling. Because the thing escaping passengers cared about was whether or not a vent was ugly, right.

“Avitus.” A hint of urgency entered Evfra’s voice. “Avitus, if Tivaah manages to unlock those doors, you need to be able to breathe. There’s no sense in you dying here too.”

It was the ‘too’ that finally snapped the last razor thin wire of his patience.

“I am _not_ listening to the man I love die,” Avitus snarled, whipping around as his mandibles splayed open and his crest flared. “Not again, do you understand me? Either we both make it out of this stupid little trap or _neither of us do_.”

Surprise spread out across Evfra’s face, his lips parting slightly. He looked like he wanted to say something, but when he finally spoke it was to ask, “How can I help?”

“Whenever the wireless signal comes in, it’s going to take a minute for those doors to open,” Avitus said, returning his attention to the area the vent ought to be. “They _will_ open, because backups on backups meant that escape pods had to be accessible in a wide variety of circumstances, but cutting the dead man’s wires means they’ll have to work harder for it. There’s going to be a hard clunk and then probably a series of beeps. That’s our countdown.”

“And you want me to listen for that?” Evfra was watching him carefully, like he was some strange, wild thing. Well, Avitus felt pretty crazy right now, so maybe it showed. Not again. He wasn’t going to let it happen again.

“I want you to shoot the open panels when you hear the clunk. That should fry the system for long enough to give us a chance at escaping.” Not long enough to give them a guarentee, but he’d spotted the vent panel finally. A chance was all he needed.

Fire on a spaceship was a bad thing. Every spacer kid learned it growing up and every turian learned it as soon as they showed up to their first posting. He’d learned it the hard way, the really hard way, watching a civilian vessel go up like a miniature sun when the kitchen fire he’d started finally got into the O2 system. They’d died fast, but they hadn’t died clean. Enemies of the Council, Saren had called them, and at the time he’d been too tangled up in doing the job to ask if the job was right.

He always asked now. And he knew exactly what kind of safety measures a cargo ship like this one would have in place. Avitus yanked his gloves off when they got in the way, tossing them down near his helmet without caring that he’d left holes in the fabric. With his talons free, it was much easier to force them up under the edges of a barely visible frame.

The O2 system was a bad place to have a fire. The engine room was much worse. So in any ship where the engine room was tucked somewhere nice and safe without bulkhead access, there would be vents. Every engine was shielded off, so sucking the air out of the room wasn’t a death sentence, but it was a good way to keep fires under control before they could spin everything _out_ of control.

It meant that the vent frame popped out without protest, over six hundred years after it had been installed, because that was exactly how it had been designed. And when Avitus hauled himself up to check inside, luck was with him. Straight shot to the engine room, and the airlocks inside the vent hadn’t been engaged yet.

He dragged himself forward, tapping along the walls of the vent near the doors until one of them sounded oddly hollow. No time to waste with finesse, so he unsheathed his omniblade, leaned as far away from the molten metal as he could manage in the confined space, and cut his way into the control wires. How much time did he have left? Not enough. He rewired the airlocks, making sure they wouldn’t shut for _any_ reason, then shoved himself back down the vent to the escape pod room.

“How far do you think you can crawl?” he asked, looking at where Evfra’s hand was still clasped over his neck. The knuckles on it were white, and Avitus wasn’t sure if that was blood loss or the sheer amount of pressure Evfra thought was necessary.

“Far enough,” Evfra said, standing up with some difficulty. “If there’s a medical kit on the other side, even better.”

“Assuming your heskaarl hasn’t tossed it, there’s a first aid kit near the door out of the engine room.” Avitus dropped into a crouch next to the vent, curling his fingers into a foothold so Evfra could heft himself up into it. “As soon as you get across, get into it and get some medigel on that stab wound. I don’t need you bleeding out on me.”

“Noted. I’ll see you on the other side.” The way Evfra said it, it was an order. But he went up into the vent without protest, and if it sounded like he was struggling to crawl down it, at least he was going.

Avitus grabbed his rifle and Evfra’s off the ground, throwing them into the vent as well. Helmets? Not necessary. That hole in Evfra’s suit meant it wouldn’t be a closed seal, and Avitus hadn’t been lying when he’d said it was both of them or neither of them. No cameras in the room to show what they had been up to, so Tivaah wouldn’t know that they were gone.

Right. He hauled himself up, then bent himself nearly in half to get into the vent feet first. Getting too damn old for this. Hips couldn’t flex the way they used to.

The rifles were by his toes, so Avitus kicked them further down and pushed himself after them. Slower going than crawling forward, but he needed to be able to access the panel again on his way through. He was dangerously aware of the seconds ticking by when he reached it and started undoing his own hard work, hands steady despite the adrenaline rushing through him. He’d make it. Just barely, but he’d make it.

There was a series of clunks from the room. The vent airlock shuddered around him and he pulled his fingers free of the wiring, shoving himself past it as fast as he could. His head cleared it seconds before the airlock slammed shut.

Cold vacuum on that side, breathable air on this side. _Damn_ he was good.

“Don’t get cocky,” he muttered to himself, bracing against the airlock and pushing himself further down the vent. “Look at what happened the last time. Your luck, the engine will be about to overload too.”

When he dropped into the room, the engine was fine. Evfra had found the first aid kit and it was open, a medigel bandage sealed to his shoulder over the stab wound. He had some loose bandages and a bottle of medigel in his lap, and when Avitus picked up the rifles, he said, “Come here. I saw you burn your fingers in the wiring.”

He looked down. Sure enough, the skin around two of his talons had the raw, glossy look of burns, blisters just starting to form around them. With everything else, he hadn’t even noticed the pain. Since it would be stupid to insist they rush out again when one of those was his trigger finger, he let Evfra take his hand.

“Ahnej was friends with Tivaah,” Evfra said, hands trembling just slightly with blood loss as he smeared medigel on the burns. “She looked up to him. The other two were lower level Resistance members, decent enough kids but with more enthusiasm than sense sometimes. Tivaah wasn’t charismatic, not the way Akksul was, but he’s a heskaarl. The reputation does the work sometimes.”

Avitus thought about how many doors being a Spectre opened, whether he wanted them open or not, and said, “I know the type.”

“When I started to look into this, he was one of my suspects, but not very high on the list. Tivaah is _loyal_ to the angara, above everything else. He wouldn’t do something to put us all at risk. So why were my men turning up dead because of him?” There was a hard edge of anger in Evfra’s voice, but underneath it was grief. 

For the same reason why he’d promised to be Pathfinder and then run, Avitus figured. Sometimes the job got too big, too terrible, and then it was easier to just do what you did best when you were special operations: hide, regroup, and find someone to kill over it. He’d been doing it for months now.

Sometime around when the Moshae was taken, Evfra had told him. Avitus watched him finish wrapping the burns, then said, “You weren’t a god anymore. Tivaah realized you were fallible, and when he realized you could make mistakes, he started thinking that’s all you did. The angara don’t trust aliens, and for good reason, but you let them onto Aya. You sacrificed some of your men for them at Meridian. You gave concessions where he thought you should be delivering bullets.”

“All of this because of _me_?” Evfra’s voice was rich with disgust.

“No. It was because of him. You were just the easier target. He’s a heskaarl, right? That means something to do with special, special something. Spec ops. Spectres. I know the type. I _am_ the type. His faith in the job was shaken, so he did the only thing he could think to do and tried to undermine your position—so that when he killed you, everyone would be relieved instead of terrified.” His mandibles flicked, and he didn’t look up to see Evfra’s face. “If everyone thought you were losing your touch, it’d be easier to downplay an assassination. But since you _weren’t_ losing your touch, he got impatient.”

“It’s such a senseless waste,” Evfra said, but his voice was softer this time. “He won't let us take him alive. These were good men and women, and now they’re just more dead soldiers on my watch. I hate this job sometimes.”

“You want my advice? Don’t give it up. You’d hate that even more.” He pulled his hands free and stood up, hauling Evfra up by the arm when it looked like he might try to stand on his own. The medigel would help, but that blood still needed to be replaced. “Let’s go finish this.”

Evfra hadn’t let go of him yet. “What you said back in there…”

“Forget it. Emotions running high, slip of the tongue, you know I’m always drunk anyways, it was nothing.” He didn’t want to break free too forcefully, but Evfra’s grip on his arm was remarkably strong for someone with half his chest soaked in blood. “ _Before_ Tivaah realizes we’re not dead?”

“You already told me you were sober, Avitus. And I believe you.” Evfra met his gaze before he could look away, then dropped his arm and reached for a rifle. “You’re right though. This comes first.”

This time, Avitus took point.

Tivaah’s blade lay in the middle of the hallway, richly sapphire with Evfra’s blood. It had gone in deep too, and Avitus avoided kicking it with effort. He wanted to crush the thing under his boot, but they needed the element of surprise. Tivaah had been expecting them the first time, but he wasn’t expecting them now. Despite how _deliberately_ the knife had been left there.

There was an explosive burst of electromagnetism behind him and Avitus whirled, raising his gun and sighting in. Now visible, Tivaah staggered backwards from Evfra, a second blade falling from his fingers as his own field flickered and jumped, trying to hide him again. He kept going patchily invisible, but not quite invisible enough.

He didn’t bother with a body shot, not with Tivaah this close and his armor impossible to see. Avitus aimed for the eyes and pulled the trigger.

Thirty seconds later, the system rebooted and the alarms went off.

“We should let Ryder know that we’re alive here,” Avitus said after pulling up his omnitool and hacking in far enough to make the noise _stop_. Evfra moved past him with the careful stride of a very injured man, heading for the cockpit. “How’s the radio on your ship work?”

“I assumed we would use the ones in here. I know Jaal’s callsign by heart, and they’ll be listening for us.” The doors slid open at his approach, revealing a mess of angaran computers hastily wired into human-designed piloting arrays. Most of the core systems had been left alone, but Tivaah’s crew had clearly tried to make the controls something they were all used to.

Through the windows, Avitus could see the Tempest hovering near the triad of ships, one slowly listing towards an asteroid with its engines cut. He wondered if Ryder would hand these coordinates over to the Nexus for salvage and, if she did, whether the ships would still be here by the time Initiative personnel came out to rescue them. Pirates still owned a full third of the original fleet of ships the Nexus had arrived in Andromeda with.

“No video,” Evfra said as he fiddled with something at one of the angaran consoles. “That makes this easier.”

Avitus tuned him out as he contacted Jaal and got a report. Four injuries to the Pathfinder crew, all minor, and the angara inside dead. There was grief and anger in Jaal’s voice; he must have recognized some of the Resistance members who’d turned their backs on the cause. So, Tivaah had left his alien cohort down on the surface of the planet and kept his angara somewhere safely out of reach when possible. That meant cleanup, which would be his problem once it fell out of Kaetus’s jurisdiction. The Outcasts were probably dead already, and the Collective members wouldn’t be far behind. That left the freelancers, like him, who’d signed up with the group for one reason or another.

The word on the ground had been ‘pirate crew’ but Avitus knew better. After seeing these ships and Tivaah’s operation, he could say for certain that the people left back on Kadara would never see a cent from actual pillaging—they’d been a means to an end, an attempt to destabilize Evfra’s position and set up for a better successor. Hard to tell if Tivaah had someone in mind. If he were anything like Avitus, that wasn’t the sort of thing he’d write down.

So the freelancers would be his to deal with, and they were money oriented. Pirateering scum, if they’d intended to sign up with this group, but money oriented. Once he explained that their boss was dead and lying to them anyways, most of them would take themselves off without complaint. Easier to make money if they were still breathing. 

That would eat up a couple weeks at least. And then what?

He blinked, then turned back to Evfra. “What did you say?”

“I asked if you had pressing business back on Kadara,” Evfra repeated, his thumbs rubbing into the divots of his eye sockets. That would be the stress and the blood loss. He needed a doctor.

“Nothing that can’t wait a while longer,” he said, because it sounded better than a flat ‘no’. The only business he ever had was paying off his tab at Kralla’s Song. Everything else was just a way to pass the time.

“Good. I don’t know if I’m up to flying back by myself, and it occurred to me that you have a shuttle and some ability to fly it.” Evfra looked up at him, hands dropping. Through the too-pale skin of his face, bruising was starting to show under his eyes, a weariness tugging at the corner of his mouth. “I don’t want to worry Jaal over something perfectly survivable. And we need to talk.”

Perfectly survivable, ha! Avitus shut his mouth on the words with a click, biting back the nastiness that was an unreasonable response to a stressful situation. It _was_ survivable, provided Evfra stopped pretending like he wasn’t injured at all, and they did need to talk. But Avitus didn’t _want_ to talk, not when the angry declaration downstairs hovered between them, not when it was so much easier to just ignore it and pretend like he’d never said the words at all.

They had been true words. That was the problem.

“We’ll have to get the supplies off your ship,” he said after a moment, because that was a safe topic. “And it’s a nice ship. Shame to leave it behind.”

Evfra didn’t smile, but his lips twitched like he almost wanted to. “Jaal and the one known as Liam will be retrieving it. You weren’t listening to anything I said, were you?”

Avitus made a vague, dismissive gesture with his injured hand, then picked up Evfra’s rifle and hitched it to his back. “Alright, alright, you’ve got me cornered. Come on, let’s get you into the shuttle before you can’t walk anymore.”

For a moment, Evfra clearly struggled between the need for help and the desire to avoid being seen as weak. Common sense won out, and he reached for Avitus’s outstretched arm, bracing most of his weight against the turian’s side. The blood on his armor left smears on Avitus’s, but it had started to dry and stain. As they passed the blade responsible, Avitus gave into temptation and kicked it far out of sight.

“You know, I should probably insist you go aboard the Tempest for a medical check at least,” Avitus said, firming his grip around Evfra’s waist before he used his jump jets to ease their leap from the upper deck to the cargo bay floor. Evfra still grunted softly in pain when they landed.

“I’m a terrible patient. Better to get me back to Aya, where Olvek can fuss over me and I don’t have to worry about what a strange doctor is writing down.” Evfra freed himself from Avitus’s hands as they reached the shuttle, getting himself settled on the bench that had been turned into a bed ages ago. “There’s a small box under the pilot’s chair of nutrient paste, and a second medical kit beside it. Those are the only two things I need from the ship—the rest can return with Jaal.”

He hooked the rifles up on the weapons rack just inside the door to the shuttle, then hopped back down to find the cockpit of Evfra’s ship. Like so many angaran things, the elegant, organic lines of its shape did much to hide the barren nature of the interior. They might be creatures of beauty, but the angara were also pragmatic to the core. It was tempting to ask if they could switch ships, except that meant having people flying his home around without him and the thought made his skin crawl.

With the rations in hand, he checked that the ship was maglocked to the floor, then finally headed back to his own. Evfra was still upright, grimacing faintly before smoothing his expression out when he heard Avitus step in, the pain in his posture disappearing. It was almost a perfect mirror to his own.

“Stop hiding that you’re in pain,” Avitus said, checking to see if nutrient paste was labeled before shoving it under the bed with one of his own caches of food. “There should be something in your kit that can help. I’m going to navigate us out of this asteroid belt before setting the autopilot for Aya.”

“The Scourge is much harder to navigate close to the planet.” Evfra took the medical kit with the faintly unhappy look of a man who knew better than to argue. “I suggest setting your destination for some point just outside the Onaon system. I can show you the path in from there.”

“Only if you promise to stop gritting your teeth and actually take something,” Avitus told him like the hypocrite he was. Now that the heat of battle was fading, his wrist hurt like hell, the throbbing matched by the hot pulse of pain from his burned fingers, and his hips weren’t too happy with him either. Once they were out of the asteroid belt, he could do something about it.

Considering the conversation ahead of him, a drink or five wouldn’t be amiss.

Damn, but he really shouldn’t have said that. It didn’t matter how honest the words were, because Avitus knew just how vicious a weapon honesty could be, better than most. A single honest word to Kaetus and half the angara on Kadara would be dead in a paranoid fit of conspiracy over possible Resistance spies. But he’d been feeling, not thinking, and the thing he’d been feeling was (the Natanus, cold as winter and three times as dead, a shuddering wreck with no power around him and the slow realization that something was terribly wrong) _anger_ beyond belief at the idea that Evfra was giving up.

He bet that if he said it like that, Evfra would deny it. Pragmatism, not suicidal tendencies, that was the key—in the face of insurmountible odds, Evfra had tried to make sure _he_ survived instead. Because he was the best weapon against the traitor he’d been hunting? Or was it because…

“Alright, you’re clear to head in,” he said over a broadband signal just strong enough to reach the Tempest once he was clear of Tivaah’s ship. “I’m taking de Tershaav back to Aya.”

“Copy that. We’ll meet you there?” That was one of the human crew. Not the one who’d met him on Havarl, but the one who’d boarded the Natanus with Ryder. Cora, he thought.

“Maybe, maybe not.” He turned the radio off before she could reply, already exhausted by the idea of dodging the Pathfinder crew. Aya wouldn’t be like Kadara, which meant getting roaringly drunk and then headbutting the nearest malcontent—more accurately, shamelessly encouraging a drunk krogan to do so—was out of the question.

Avitus set the autopilot, then dug out his bottle of Umi’s finest turian whiskey and headed back towards the conversation he didn’t want to have.

Most of Evfra’s armor now lay in pieces around the bed, his chest bare and the skin around the bandage mottled with dried blood. It faded into Evfra’s skin like shadows under the ocean, strangely beautiful despite the fact that it had come dangerously close to killing him. Such a small wound, to have repercussions so large. Tivaah had been damn good at his job.

“You’re too good to waste away on Kadara,” Evfra said in an uncanny echo of his thoughts.

Avitus paused long enough to unscrew the lid of the bottle, then sat down just outside of the explosion of armor. “You’re not the first person to tell me that, and you won’t be the last. But Kadara’s where I fit.”

“It’s where you think you belong. It is _not_ where you fit.” Evfra reached over and took the bottle away, which was surprising enough that Avitus let him. “You’ll kill yourself eventually just looking for something to do or someone to help. You can deny it all you want, but you want to help people, the right kinds of people, and you’re willing to risk too much to do that. Is this safe for me to drink?”

“Absolutely not, it has dextro-amino carbohydrates in it,” Avitus said automatically, the rest of his brain tangled up on the factually incorrect description of him. The only thing he wanted was to be _left alone_. Except that wasn’t quite true anymore, was it?

There was a soft, frustrated huff at his side. Then Evfra screwed the cap back on and set the whiskey out of reach before turning to face him, his ice-blue gaze uncompromising. “I thought I could keep my emotions out of it. I’ve had much more practice with that than most angara. I thought that I could let you break yourself by little bits each day because I knew you didn’t care enough to listen to anything else. But _now_ I know better.”

“I told you, it was a slip of the tongue,” Avitus croaked, unable to look away. With his back straight and blood smeared up his neck, Evfra looked like a statue of some ancient angaran war god, and the urge to reach out and mar that brutal perfection, just a little, was overwhelming.

“You meant it.” Evfra’s hand reached out, smoothing up the column of his throat and flattening just behind the edge of his jaw where the skin turned to hard carapace. “You said it because it was true. I could hold myself back and let a friend, _just_ a friend, destroy himself slowly if that was what he was determined to do. But I can’t do that with you anymore. Come work with the Resistance.”

He flicked his mandibles, intimately aware of the press of Evfra’s thumb against the joint of one, then swallowed carefully. Out of all the things he was expecting to hear, ‘come work for me’ was surprisingly low on the list. “I know I’ve mentioned the broad anatomical differences between turians and—”

“I need someone who can talk to people, Exiles and Nexus both, without them being on their guard. I need someone who can move in the places I can’t, who I can trust to take care of himself in a combat situation, who the entire galaxy isn’t also depending on. You need a job that has nothing to do with the Initiative.” And there, so small it was easy to miss, Evfra’s lips twitched slightly up in the smallest rueful smile that Avitus had ever seen. “And I would like a good excuse to have you visit Aya.”

“You want a personal spy?” he asked, despite the way his heart was pounding like it wanted to leap out of his chest. If Evfra hadn’t been injured, he’d have shoved the angara down against the bed by now, just to try and catch another new expression.

“I want _you_. The job is a way to make it easier for you to agree.” One of Avitus’s hands had found its way to Evfra’s waist, talons resting on the soft skin at his hip. He wasn’t sure when it had happened, but Evfra was leaning in closer, an intent look on his face. “You said it first: both of us make it, or neither of us do. It’s a philosophy I can stand by.”

“This is cheating,” Avitus breathed, leaning in too. Evfra was still too cool under his hands, but there were ways to warm him up without reopening that wound.

“It is winning, by any means necessary,” Evfra said, his voice low with a hint of desperation lurking somewhere low beneath the surface. He’d looked so surprised, back in the escape pod bay. Like he’d never expected to hear someone say they loved him ever again. It really _was_ cheating.

He was already going to Aya. It couldn’t hurt to try something new again. Evfra’s other hand fumbled with the latches on his armor as Avitus carefully pushed him down, the bony plate at his brow pressed to the softer skin on Evfra’s. Just this once, maybe he'd let himself hope again.


End file.
